1,000 Microloans for Rural Women in East Africa

Along with running the WMI loan hub, our staff  are also teachers in Buyobo or nearby villages. It is a requirement our staff to be literate in English, and this targets the local teacher population. These women teach, coordinate loan groups and office operations, while also running businesses and raising their families. They are an impressive group of women!

Penina, one of the Local Coordinators, founded and directs her own primary school in nearby Budadiri: Ambassadors Preparatory Nursery & Primary School. She started her school in 2011, teaching four kids out of her living room. Four years later, another 130 young students have joined the original class, and the school has expanded to nursery through Primary 3.

Before starting Ambassadors Primary, Penina had been working at a school that honored her for her teaching but did not pay her for a year. She says it is much better to work for yourself! In order to expand, Penina used her four successive loans from WMI to rent a few shops in a row, construct a wall to close them in from the road, build an additional classroom, and buy desks.

Songs are built into the students’ daily routine. After a break in the courtyard, kids move off to their respective classrooms singing “class, class! We go to class, class, class! We go to class!” If a student volunteers or answers questions correctly, the teacher has her/him stand up with hands on hips, and do a little dance while classmates clap and sing: “Lovely, lovely, nice, a very good girl/boy!” Alternately they might give their classmate “flowers,” reaching their arms towards the student and waving hands for a few seconds in recognition. To remind students to sit still, teachers have them sing “I am sitting like a boss, boss, boss. I am a boss, boss, boss.” With their arms and legs crossed, they sit back in their seats and look silently all around them, like the big person in charge.

Respect for others, being humble, loving one another, and sharing: These are the leadership qualities that Penina exemplifies. She says to a fault she is slow to talk about her achievements. She prefers to let parents tell their neighbors about the school, and has expanded through word of mouth about the quality of education. Humble as she may be, Penina is ambitious too! She says her next steps are to own the land she rents and expand over the next seven years to a full secondary school. She wants to teach the original students all the way through up to college.

Today, Global Giving will give a 30% match to your contribution to Women’s Microfinance Initiative.  Won’t you take a minute to make a donation to support WMI’s loan fund and give another woman like Penina the opportunity to make her own business dream come true?  Thank you so much for your support!