Microfinance Organizations
These organizations are included in the 2010 Adventure Travel Trip to Africa:
UGANDA
Living Goods
Living Goods was founded by Charles Slaughter, former co-owner of Travel Smith, who sold his business and returned to his first love, attacking poverty in developing countries.He calls Living Goods the “Avon” of basic drugs in Africa or a pharmacy in a back pack. A woman in a village or neighborhood becomes a Community Health Provider.Through microcredit she is able to buy basic drugs, such as rehydration therapy, bed nets, aspirin, condoms, etc, to fill a back pack which she then takes from door to door, selling the items for a tiny profit.She has previously visited every family in her area to learn about health conditions and needs.She is trained to distinguish between health problems her services can handle and those she will turn over to a clinical worker or hospital.She is trusted because she is of the community, she is providing reliable medicines at affordable prices and her customers do not have to travel long distances to get what they need.Weekly gatherings with her bring women together in support groups and include health lessons from a professional.
Chuck Slaughter developed this model in Uganda for replication throughout the developing world. Rather than building a vast administrative unit he finds a partner organization in each country to deliver the program. After a long search for the right partner in Uganda he chose BRAC, founded in 1972 in Bangladesh as the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee.BRAC is the largest nongovernmental organization (NGO) in the world.It manages a holistic set of programs to attack poverty and related ills.It now operates in several countries and is currently planning major expansion in Africa. BRAC helped establish Living Goods, which is now operating on its own.
FAULU Uganda
This group is an affiliate of Opportunity International, an international ecumenical microfinance organization with a program in Uganda that combines microcredit with HIV/AIDS education, prevention and treatment.Opportunity International also has a microcredit program in rural areas where there are no schools. Aspiring teachers use microcredit to start schools and pay back their loans through charging minimal tuition. This is particularly important for girls, as 60-70% of girls in sub-Saharan Africa do not go to school because they are fetching water, taking care of their families, selling on the street or because their brothers’ education takes priority.
AWOFS (Aids Widows and Orphans Family Support)
This is a program of a Catholic AIDS hospital in Uganda. It has a microfinance dimension that has made a remarkable difference for many families. Several years ago Uganda’s President Museveni brought HIV/AIDS into the open, ending years of shame and ignorance. An AWOFS van with its name clearly marked openly visits families, unheard of not that long ago. As a result of its national campaign on HIV/AIDS Uganda was the first country in Africa to dramatically reduce new infections.
Grameen Foundation’s Village Phone Operators
Grameen Foundation has 10,000 villages in Uganda where a telephone entrepreneur, usually a woman, is the “telephone company” for the village. Pioneered in Bangladesh, a woman in each village buys a cell phone with microcredit and then sells time at a small profit. She makes a living; villagers are able to reach relatives in other villages by phone instead of days of walking; students are able to call their families, etc. In its latest innovation Grameen has created a text messaging service for Ugandans who often live far from markets and health clinics. Using the service, farmers are able to get weather forecasts, search a data base for agricultural advice, discover fair market prices for their crops and find buyers in the cities. The service also provides sexual and reproductive health information, as well as a tool to help people locate health providers and find out what services they offer. People who cannot read, or speak a local language can still access the information through one of these telephone operators. With a $20 phone and 12 keys, which is a huge majority of the four billion phones around the world, people can do an incredible amount – the program continues to find innovative uses to improve lives and communities in developing countries.
TANZANIA
WEDAC (Women’s Empowerment Development Agency Company)
This program involves about 2000 Maasai women in seven regions of Tanzania including the Monduli area, north of Arusha, our first Tanzanian city. The former Director, Martha Umbulla, is a Member of Parliament, elected two years ago on the basis of her work in microcredit with WEDAC. Women entrepreneurs are involved in a variety of small businesses, from selling porridge or garden produce in the market to fattening goats for milk and meat, to creating the signature Maasai beaded collars and jewelry. The Maasai traditionally roamed the savannah in Tanzania and Kenya, herding their cattle and protecting them from lions. Colonial borders cut across their lands. Modernization has further eroded their way of life and they are living in more confined areas or even in cities. Maasai men have traditionally been pretty brutal to their women. Microcredit businesses have empowered Maasai women in remarkable ways and they will tell you about it.
PRIDE Tanzania
This program operates in Arusha and in rural areas. It is one of several PRIDEs, loosely associated but operating independently. The Director is James Obama, a talented Tanzanian MBA, highly respected in the microfinance world. PRIDE Tanzania has created a new model which operates a bank for financial services and a nongovernmental organization (NGO) for ancillary educational services such as lessons in HIV/AIDS prevention, literacy, nutrition, health, etc. The NGO owns the bank, thus ensuring that the mission of both focuses on the truly poor. A young indigenous MBA woman runs the financial services program of the bank. She is extremely impressive and can match any Harvard trained MBA in the United States. PRIDE Tanzania is a highly disciplined program of weekly meetings. Each hour fifty people in 10 groups of 5 repay loans, receive new loans and go back to work in their businesses, making way for the next group. Some men also participate in this program.
WORTH/PACT
WORTH is a program of PACT, a U. S. based nonprofit that works in 46 countries in Asia, Eurasia, Africa, Latin America and The Caribbean. PACT’s programs target one of five program sectors: democracy and governance, HIV/AIDS, livelihoods, natural resource management and peace building. WORTH women become bankers and lenders of loan funds that they own and manage themselves. Most microfinance programs start by providing external credit, which is lent to borrowers by the institutions’ loan officers. In WORTH, women mobilize their own capital to build a loan fund through weekly savings. They lend to each other, carrying out transactions without the assistance of an external loan officer. By learning basic literacy, math and accounting skills, members maintain accurate records and establish checks and balances that assure their funds are safe. Moreover, since women own their village banks, the interest they pay stays with the group, allowing its capital to grow rapidly or to be distributed as dividends. Through a model of decentralized, grassroots control, WORTH women learn to provide financial services to each other and to build on their own resources.
