AFRICA-FINANCE: African Women Fear Microcredit Talks Excluded Them

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 7 1997 (IPS) - The recently ended Microcredit Summit in Washington sparked excitement among many microcredit and non-governmental groups in the developing world — but also prompted worries among African women that they were being left out.

“Most of the African delegates (at the summit) noticed the same thing,” said Felicia Quartey-Acquaye of the Ghana-based group World Women’s Banking. “We observed that Africa had not been focused on at all, and we were sad…Africa has no time to wait any longer.”

At a U.N. discussion held Thursday to follow up on the Feb 2-4 summit, representatives from several African non-governmental organisations (NGOs) urged that the continent not be ignored in plans to expand microfinance.

Soukeyna Ba Ndieye of Senegal’s Femme Developpement Entreprise en Afrique agreed that NGOs had been “shut out” from the Summit, which focused more on microfinancing innovations in Latin America and Asia. The United Nations, she said, should provide a forum to ensure that Africa has a role in the microcredit debate.

But Ambassador Fassassi Adam Yacoubou of Benin countered that “if a lot is being said about Latin America and Asia, it’s because a lot is being done there.” Africans should develop more institutions to support microfinance work before they can participate more fully in that expanding field, he said.

Delegates at the ‘Africa Advocacy Forum’, co-sponsored by Germany’s Friedrich Ebert Stiftung foundation, added that Africa’s poorest population — rural women — should be a special focus to receive improved access to credit.

Expanding microcredit to rural women, they said, would both lessen poverty and improve food self-sufficiency in a continent which is projected to be home to 300 million chronically undernourished people by 2010.

“We have been told many times over that the majority of food producers in rural Africa are women and that the poorest of the poor are rural women,” said Chief Bisi Ogunleye, executive director of the Country Women’s Association of Nigeria (COWAN).

Yet rural African women, she added, are uniquely experienced with traditional “responsive banking” techniques which can best make use of the small-scale loans of such microcredit institutions as Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank.

“Experience has shown that women in rural Africa are credit- worthy,” Quartey-Acquaye said. She noted that African banks have recouped more than 95 percent of all loans made to rural women, a recovery rate she said larger banks would envy.

African women are also one of the main props of the informal sector economy, from making small crafts to street vending. Several U.N. studies estimate that the informal sector will contrib~ute 60 to 70 percent of employment, and about 20 percent of the gross domestic product, in Africa.

“It is commonly acknowledged that the informal sector of small entrepreneurs and enterprises constitutes the most dynamic and effective sector of African societies,” said U.N. Under-Secretary- General Jin Yongjian.

He noted that Grameen Bank — the model for microfinance projects in more than 40 nations already — gives more than 94 percent of its loans to women. African NGOs hope their continent’s women can also receive a similarly high percentage of loans going to the poorest sectors to help women start up small informal- sector businesses.

Many groups which combine traditional African lending practises with microcredit innovations have already shown impressive growth. COWAN, for example, in its new report on its credit experiences, titled, ‘Poverty Anti-Clockwise’, says it has grown from 225 members in 1982 to 120,000 members by the end of last year.

COWAN’s growth stems partly from its adherence to African village traditions, such as the inclusion of village elders and religious leaders in the selection of small community-based groups which go on to pool their resources to improve their credit access.

Some of its methods of ensuring loan repayment are quite culturally specific, as the report makes clear.

“In Ibo community, the group would go to the front of the (loan defaulter’s) house, call the defaulter out and…bend down to take the soil and hold it in their hands and look straight (ahead)…without a word. This is a curse that the soil would immediately swallow the defaulter,” according to the report.

Traditional women’s banking groups should be encouraged, Quartey-Acquaye said, noting her own mother instructed her in those practises long before the current debate on microcredit. But more needs to be done, she said, including halting practises, such as some structural adjustment policies, which can harm women’s livelihoods.

“(Women’s) empowerment must go beyond improved access to financial resources to include legal rights to control of those resources by means of property ownership and inheritance rights,” Jin added.

But a major part of the challenge, argued Bella Abzug, a co- chair of the Council of Advocates for the Microcredit Summit, will be in obtaining financial support from the industrialised world to fund such activities in the South. Why is it, she asked, that the United States can put men on the moon, but not put women on their feet?