Anyone with a business will know how critical it is to have access to credit.
But in Africa, where the vast majority of rural people have neither access to banks, nor the necessarily collateral to secure small loans, the opportunity to develop income-generating enterprises can be extremely limited.
And that is especially so for women, who are denied equal access to land, credit, inputs, transport, extension services, technical assistance, market opportunities and know-how.
For the past decade, Self Help Africa has been developing micro-finance opportunities in rural Africa - and has focussed these activities primarily at rural poor women.
Loans from as little as $80 have allowed women to start new farming activities, have enabled them to add value to existing activities, and have afforded opportunities to develop off-farm enterprises to earn a living.
These loans have been used by borrowers to purchase, rear and fatten livestock, to begin poultry production, to start beekeeping, and to produce and process food from their harvests. Other women have established market stalls, trading posts, shops, restaurants and much more.
Self Help Africa's savings and credit co-operatives (SACCOs) are administered, managed and run by the women themselves, and are designed to both provide the seed capital to start income generating activities, and also to encourage a culture of savings amongst rural poor people.
'Rural poor people try to produce enough food to feed their families all year round. What they cannot buy they must barter, and if that is not an option then, like everyone else, they must buy their food,' says Self Help Africa's SACCO programme co-ordinator Kalifa Abdulah. 'Encouraging a culture of saving gives rural people the security of money at times of crop failure, or during a period when the food they have harvested has run out.'
In Ethiopia alone, over 26,000 members of Self Help Africa-supported savings and credit co-operatives now manage a loan book of over $1,000,000.
Five unions manage 185 individual co-ops across the country, with an average of 142 members in each of these co-ops. Repayment rates average over 98%, and average interest is 12%. Over 70% of co-op members are women, and there are currently 13,000 loans for activities ranging from livestock fattening to petty trading.
Studies show that small increases in a woman's income have a disproportionately greater impact on the health and wellbeing of her family. |
