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| Volume 1, Issue 4: September '03 | ||||
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In This Issue Plenary Session: Empowering Women Through Microfinance/ Innovations from the Field Plenary Session: Presentation of BRAC Institutional Action Plan State of the Microcredit Summit Campaign Report 2003 to be released November 3 in New York USAID and SEEP Network to Facilitate Development of Poverty Assessment Tools Archived Issues
Vol 1 Iss 4 Sept. '03 |
Plenary Session: Empowering Women Through Microfinance/Innovations from the FieldQuestions and Answers for Plenary Panelists about Empowering Women Through MicrofinanceQuestion #1, John Hatch: We've had a lot of talk about social indicators. And one of those indicators that we hopefully will learn how to measure is empowerment results from microfinance programs. So I want to ask you, the empowerment experts, if you had a chance to ask only one question on an evaluation instrument that measured empowerment, what would that measure be, what would that question be?
Susy Cheston: Empowerment is such a complex and rich topic so that's a very challenging question. But I think if we had to choose one at this point, given what our research showed us and what we know today. I think we would focus on decision making ability. We found so much in terms of women having new ability to make decisions about managing their household funds, managing their enterprise funds, making decisions so that girl children as well as boy children could have enough to eat, go to school, be married off properly, etc. In addition to basics such as having control over investing their own loans and in some cases not having control over investing their own loans, family size and makeup, what kinds of contributions they're able to make to the community. So I think we could create a decision-making scale that would look at a woman's ability to make decisions or have control over a set of six or seven of these kinds of aspects of their lives related to their business, their family and their community. Question #2, Len Good: How is Sinapi Aba Trust able to get such a high financial rate of return and self-sufficiency and obviously empower women? Can you elaborate a bit? Lisa Kuhn: …One of the great things is that they are able to reach a lot of people. They have 27,000 clients right now through all the departments of Ghana and they do this through, primarily the trust bank methodology where they're reaching large numbers of women. The training is built into the trust bank meetings and the solidarity group meetings. The clients themselves place a lot of value on the training that they receive, so much so, that they're willing, they say in studies, to pay more for the training. So Sinapi does charge maybe, 65 or 70 cents to each client for the training. …the main cost that Sinapi incurs is actually training their staff to deliver the training. And that they do for the business training by bringing in outside experts, which then train the loan officers in bulk or in a batch to keep the cost down. The cost is down to $125 per loan officer for the training. And then, each loan officer serves approximately 500 clients so you're looking at a cost of about 25 cents per client, which is really not a lot. The other thing that they do very well is link up with other organizations operating in their area like Planned Parenthood Association of Ghana and some other institutions that provide legal counseling, women's rights counseling, different things like that, sometimes for a fee, sometimes just because it's part of their mission. They want an audience and Sinapi Aba is able to provide that. |