According to this MOU, within the MOU’s term, more than 150 billion Toman interest-free loans are dedicated to job generation and society-based projects of Barakat Foundation in villages and deprived areas. The cap predicted for such loans is 30 million tomans with maximum 60 months for reimbursement.
In the signing ceremony of this MOU, Eng. Saeed Jafari, CEO of Barakat Foundation, an EIKO affiliated entity emphasized the importance of job generation for the youth and said, “Our approach in the employment area is a systematic look, especially to the deprived regions, in order to pave the way for resources to be used for production and making sustainable incomes.”
“With regard to concerns of Ayatollah Khamenei on employment and resistive economy, EIKO pays a special attention to this issue and has focused its attention on this area in order to direct consequences of activities to the sustainable employment of youth in the deprived areas and villages of the country”, Eng. Saeed Jafari said.
CEO of Barakat Foundation stressed, “In this way, Barakat Foundation, as the representative of EIKO, has started its studies since two years ago and has reached a framework in terms of both resources and theoretical discussion, as today along with the contribution model in the Barakat Foundation we see operationalization of contributory model in the local societies, especially across the villages and deprived areas of the country in terms of generation of sustainable employment.”
He also said that operationalization of “Aseman” and “Aftab” initiatives in the same way and added, “We should attract contribution of local societies for implementation of such initiatives. Social and economic empowerment of people and identification of some economic advantages of each region in the target society, production, distribution and marketing will help us to achieve a full chain.”
“If production is not resulted in selling products, the job you have created would not be sustainable, so making production purposeful with regard to relative advantages of each region and encouraging villagers’ portfolio diversification is critically important. In the same direction, along with supporting and competing for agriculture and husbandry chain, we need to take advantage of diversification of other products,” Eng. Jafari stated.
CEO of Barakat Foundation added, “Along with this, we need to move towards small resources and jobs instead of investing on large industries with hefty resources. In 2017, Barakat Foundation created 1100 jobs in six deprived regions of the country through implementing society-based projects and initiatives and for this year, we have planned to activate 1000 groups, each includes 20 members, in order to cover 20000 people with Aseman Initiative and as a result we will create 7000 sustainable jobs for our people.”
“Within past ten years the Execution of Imam Khomeini Order has invested about 8900 billion tomans in various sections of deprivation eradication, and a total of 350 enterprises have been activated, out which 180 enterprises have been transferred to people,” he emphasized.
Eng. Jafari referred to Barakat Foundation’s approach as an approach in the continuance of its society-based initiatives and said, “These society-based initiatives can direct activities and measurements of Barakat Foundation and determine its path.”
Dr. Asgari Azad, Head of board of directors of Barakat Foundation, was another speaker of this ceremony who pointed to immigration trend of villagers from villages to cities as one of the most important challenges of the country and said, “Since 1974 the percentage of Iran’s rural population has decreased from 75% to 26% and if fail to solve the employment issue in our villages, given the lion’s share of agriculture jobs in contrast to total jobs in the country, our rural population will decrease to 12% by the next 10 years and it would be a serious social, economic and security risk for our country.”
He also pointed to the major problems of the government to govern the country and said that the government is not able to solve the employment problem and added, “The government is not able to solve the employment problem by itself. So, we need to diversify jobs in villages and start to work in fields other than agriculture and husbandry in order to keep our rural youth in the villages through development and extension of jobs.”
“With the development of higher education in some villages we find educated people who now suffer from employment problem and we should solve this problem,” Dr. Asgari Azad added.
He pointed out to this fact that Barakat Foundation has made about two years of study for solving the employment problem in the villages and stated, “For this issue, we offered to initiatives: Aseman and Aftab. Aseman Initiative is about the development of home businesses based on scientific and technical methods, while Aftab initiative has been designed for standardizing, packing, preparing, processing and marketing products and is supposed to support rural home businesses across the province, region and even exports to other nations.”
He also explained that Barakat Foundation has planned for training villagers and a unique business model has been designed for each job and added, “These programs are taught to people by operators who are recruited and trained for this initiative and finally they will be started through dedication of financial resources which are awarded as interest-free loans.”
Head of the board of directors of Barakat Foundation also said that they have negotiated with several financial institutes to finance this project and they have been succeeded to reach an agreement with Mehr Iran Interest-free Bank. “According to this MOU, it has been determined that a total of 150 billion rials loans is dedicated for rural job creation initiatives through contribution and cooperation between Barakat Foundation and Mehr Iran Interest-free Bank.”
He also said that the cap predicted for the loans of this initiative is 30 million Tomans and Barakat Foundation is going to create 7000 jobs from resources of such facilities.
In this ceremony, Dr. Akbari, CEO of Mehr Iran Interest-free Bank, said, “Because of nature of its activities, i.e. awarding interest-free loans with 3 to 4% bank fees, Mehr Iran Interest-free Bank can play a key role in small and medium-size businesses. Since years ago, Mehr Iran Interest-free Bank has made its best to play effective roles in livelihood, treatment, marriage, and employment and be able to offer some proper loans with low fees to the producing sections of the society or those sections which have dire needs.”
“In the last year, Mehr Iran Interest-free Bank has awarded 752000 loans, with the value of 8200 billion tomans, out which 50-55% have been dedicated to job creation sector. 45% of them were for livelihood and marriage and with the aim of meeting needs of low-income people. This year, in accordance with the policy devised by the Bank’s BD, we are going to direct loan-awarding policies of the bank towards job creation initiatives through working with entities like Barakat Foundation,” he added.
Dr. Akbari expressed his satisfaction for signing the rural job creation MOU with Barakat Foundation and explained about the mechanism of how such loans would be awarded: “According to this MOU a total of 1500 billion rials loans with the fee of 3 to 4 % with the 48 to 60 months reimbursement period will be distributed among people.”
