1,000 Microloans for Rural Women in East Africa

Here at Women’s Microfinance Initiative we are always looking at the various ways we can help to improve the villages in which we work, involving the community, and bringing leadership and financial literacy skills to additional folks. Girls’ Group is a community outreach activity which offers an opportunity for school-aged girls in grades 5, 6, and 7 to come together outside of class to learn health education and entrepreneurship skills. The goal is to prepare these young women for healthy, productive futures and to instill in them the entrepreneurial skills that WMI values.

Uganda is ranked as the most entrepreneurial country in the world: 28% of Ugandan adults own or co-own a business. That means our girls’ group graduates will have stiff competition after they complete school to develop successful, sustainable businesses. We hope that offering opportunities early on for girls to learn basic business skills, including budgeting and making a business plan, will give them a strong leg up as the enter the workforce.

The Girls’ Group is gaining first-hand business experience by caring for three pigs – two females and one male. Piggery is a common income-generating activity in Uganda, and the girls have been very eager to learn how to care for the pigs.  Recently, both female pigs delivered babies! The girls are now caring for both mothers as well as their combined 15 piglets. This offers a great first-hand opportunity for the girls to operate a business by planning for upkeep costs, marketing and sales of the piglets and managing the group’s income. We are very excited!

The HIV epidemic in Uganda, and all over Sub-Saharan Africa, affects young women in disproportionate percentages to their male peers. Girls’ Group offers an opportunity to teach HIV education in a safe, single-gender environment that promotes active learning. We teach about how HIV is transmitted, the risk factors for HIV and how a girl can prevent infection. The group focuses both on biological and sociological factors that lead to HIV transmission.

So far, we are proud to have graduated dozens of girls from this program over the past two years. We are very excited for their success in their secondary educations and in their careers to come. 

We hope you will be excited about bringing more pigs to market and support WMI!

Mud, a little ingenuity, some perseverance, and a small loan from WMI are the four ingredients Tecla needed to make her thriving business.  After two years in the loan program, borrowers like Tecla in Tloma village, Tanzania are diversifying and expanding their businesses to improve their earning potential and household living standards.

Tloma lies close to the rim of the Ngorongoro Crater, where women trace their ancestry back to the Iraqw tribe that inhabits this region. While the Iraqw have their own traditional language, many in Tloma have adopted Tanzania's national language and speak Kiswahili, reflecting the relatively progressive nature of the Tloma community. Because the village is less isolated, the community is more integrated with the country's overall development (compared to more traditional tribes like the Maasai); nevertheless, most families are extremely poor, living on an average household income of less than 50 cents per day.

Typical families engage in subsistence agriculture (maize, beans and soy beans) and raise livestock for home consumption and sale. Tloma's economy is active, which means the women in WMI's program have some experience buying/selling of goods. Their problem was access to capital to expand their businesses. With spirit and determination the ladies welcomed the WMI loan program as their opportunity to change their lives.

So where does the mud come in?  Tecla used her first loan to open a shop in Karatu town, near the village. She trained her sons to help her early on, and that proved to be an important decision when she started another business and was able to leave day-to-day shop operations in her children’s hands.

Once Tecla had made some money from the shop, she was excited to start expanding her house. She started making bricks in her backyard for the construction, and it occurred to her that she had enough natural resources there to make extra bricks and sell them. Now she focuses on the brick business – she sells 10,000 bricks every dry season – while her children serve customers at her shop.

Most homes in the village are made of mud, cow dung, and sticks, but Tecla now lives in a brick house built with her business profits.  Seeing her house, Tecla's neighbors are buying her bricks to build their own houses, which they can now afford because of the loan program!

Tecla is the perfect example of how a small loan and some training, combined with ingenuity and perseverance, levels the economic playing field for so many women.  It doesn’t always take millions of dollars and an army of international aid workers to make significant and long lasting progress in improving the lives of disadvantaged women in East Africa. WMI capitalizes on your donations by directing its resources to a permanent loan pool. 

When Tecla repays her loan there is another woman ready to take a loan and start on the path to economic success.  Her business will mean improvements to her family’s health, nutrition, and education – the three essential factors to sustained change.  Won't you help more women like Tecla realize their dreams?