Building a Women's Weaving Cooperative

Over the past 6 months, the Mahampy Weavers’ Cooperative Workshop has been a home to a pilot scheme of financial literacy training sessions. Involving 10 female weavers, the sessions included topics such as understanding and planning household spending, budgeting and saving, and investing in their mahampy weaving businesses. These sessions aimed to contribute to a deeper understanding of financial management, a step towards building the foundation for financial resilience of women in Sainte Luce.

Surveys taken both before and after the scheme revealed some exciting results, including an increase of almost 50% in the number of women having 'a lot' of knowledge on investing in their mahampy business, and a 70% increase in women having 'a lot' of knowledge on how their income and expenses differ throughout the year.

In addition to this, SEED Madagascar (SEED), launched an alternative loan system in March 2023 to boost the financial resilience of Mahampy Cooperative members.  These loans cover immediate costs such as food or medication, as well as investment in mahampy reeds to weave new mats. Under the new system, when mats are sold, weavers pay back 10% of income to the Cooperative, 20% towards repaying the loan, and 70% is kept back by the loanee as profit. This system is proving a success and the loan amounts are now doubled.

To increase sales, there have been technical meetings on how to improve the quality of weaved products. As a result, the resellers have continued to visit the mahampy weaving workshops to buy mats. All these strides towards achieving financial resilience among women weavers in the Anosy region, are proving a great success because of the generous donors supporting SEED’s Mahampy weaving initiative.