By Rachel Blackmore | WMI - Tanzania Leadership Team
Dear Supporters,
We often find that an anecdotal story about one of our borrowers will tell you much more about Women’s Microfinance Initiative (WMI) than all the facts and statistics we could gather. We were especially taken with this recent report coming from our program in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA) of Tanzania.
Our borrower, Naiharwa C., is 43 years old and has six children, four boys and two girls, all of them are in school. She lives in Alailelai village in the NCA,where conservation policies are implemented by the Tanzanian government. The goal of the NCA is to preserve the land, wildlife, and pastoral way of life of the Maasai peoples. Unfortunately, both the human population and their livestock has grown dramatically, stressing the land, and leading some to believe the residents should be evicted to protect the reserve. Others feel removal of the Maasai infringes upon their rights and will erode the beauty of this diverse land. While we don’t take a position on the two-decades-old controversy, we do recognize the detrimental side effect of the policies -- extreme poverty to the local population, affecting their ways of life in economic, social, and political aspects. Our goal is to work with the Maasai women to help them start small businesses, many related to tourism, that will provide them with the income they need to maintain their families.
Naiharwa, one of primary beneficiaries of the loans from the program we run in cooperation with our local partners, Weston Turville Wells for Tanzania [WTWT] and Maasai Partners. When we interviewed her, she wanted to let us know about her family’s situation before being beneficiary of the loan and now after receiving the loan from WMI.
She reports My family situation before was very poor in aspects of economic and social as follows:
The situation of my family after receiving the loans from WTWT in collaboration with WMI has totally changed as can been seen below:
On behalf of all loan beneficiaries I recommend, acknowledge, and appreciate the efforts of the WMI partners to double their efforts on our behalf, so that we can double the profits and hence transform our ways of life in the area of social, economic and political aspects that has been affected by harsh conservational policies.
Wow! Naiharwa might not have more than a few years of formal schooling, but she has an MBA education in real life experience. We hope you will join us in helping women like Naiharwa by providing small loans, training, and encouragement to start small businesses that support their families. We wish you a happy Springtime!
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