A Revolving Loan Fund (RLF) is a source of money from which loans are made for multiple small business development projects. Revolving loan funds share many characteristics with microcredit, micro-enterprise, and village banking, namely providing loans to persons or groups of people that do not qualify for traditional financial services or are otherwise viewed as being high risk. Borrowers tend to be small producers of goods and services — typically artisans, farmers, and women who have no credit history or access to other types of loans from financial institutions. Organizations that offer revolving loan fund lending aim to help new project or business owners in become financially independent and eventually to become eligible for loans from commercial banks.
The fund gets its name from the revolving aspect of loan repayment, where the central fund is replenished as individual projects pay back their loans, creating the opportunity to issue other loans to new projects.
Famous quotes containing the words revolving, loan and/or fund:
“A Route of Evanescence
With a revolving Wheel—”
—Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)
“Neither a borrower nor a lender be,
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“I am advised that there is an unexpended balance of about $45,000 of the fund appropriated for the relief of the sufferers by flood upon the Mississippi River and its tributaries, and I recommend that authority be given to use this fund to meet the most urgent necessities of the poorer people in Oklahoma.”
—Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)