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E-news Main Page In This Issue Beggars, Savers and Borrowers: the ‘Good Families’ of Jamii Bora A Guardian for those at the Bottom: Bandhan’s Work to Reach the Poorest Measuring Client Progress out of Poverty: Successful Workshop in Hyderabad, India Archived Issues Vol 6 Iss 1 Dec '08 E-News Information |
Beggars, Savers and Borrowers: the ‘Good Families’ of Jamii BoraIt stands to reason that an organization that does remarkable work would have a remarkable history. Jamii Bora, which counts beggars and former thieves among its 170,000 members, is now the largest microfinance institution in Kenya. Its founder, Ingrid Munro, has driven the MFI’s revolutionary projects, including a “get sober” program, a housing project, and an in-house health insurance product. The most extraordinary of Ms. Munro’s accomplishments, however, is the creation of an institution through which some of the most destitute members of society have built dignified lives for themselves and their families. The following interview with Ms. Munro offers a glimpse into how Jamii Bora evolved, its current operations, and why microfinance is important for the poorest.
The following is the transcription of an interview Microcredit Summit Campaign Director Sam Daley-Harris conducted with Jamii Bora founder Ingrid Munro in October 2007. Microcredit Summit: RESULTS volunteers1 in the United States and around the world have been working for four years to get half of the World Bank’s microfinance funds to those living on less than a dollar a day. The argument that comes from the World Bank and from others is that you can’t reach the very poor with microfinance, that they need safety nets instead. Do you agree with this position? Ingrid Munro: I don’t agree with that at all, because in Jamii Bora we know that you can reach the very poor. Not just reach them, not just feel sorry for them, pat them on the head, and say, “We are going to help you to come above the poverty line.” Our experience is, first of all, that the most desperate are the ones that need microfinance the most. They can handle it; we have proven that. It’s not something that is a theory, it is a proven fact. The poorer they are, the more they need microfinance. They don’t need charity because charity is a way to keep people down. If [we] keep saying, “I feel very sorry for you because you can’t manage this yourself,” you start thinking [to yourself] “I should feel sorry for myself because I can’t manage [on my own].” But if we say, “You can make it. You have talents. God has given you talents like He has given everybody talents, and He wants you to use them. And [if] you see that some of your friends who were begging beside you on the same street now walk around in nice dresses, and that their children are in school, they eat three meals a day, and they live in a better house—then you also dare to dream that that is possible for [you too]. Microcredit Summit: You say that some groups have tried to reach the very poor, but they get their fingers burned. What are some of the principles that allow you to succeed when you work with beggars, landless laborers, and prostitutes? Ingrid Munro: You have to be very close. You see, the beggar is a professional; begging is a profession in itself. If you come and give a beggar $100, and say, “You go and start a business,” they will run away with that money. You have to prepare everybody, you see. We think you have to start by getting them to save, because then they are in that habit of setting aside a bit of money every day. That makes it easy for them to pay back the loan. You also have to be there and encourage them when the problems come. The city authorities chase you away from where you are doing your business. A police officer might even take your goods, or thieves break in to your little kiosk, or you have a fire that [burns] down everything. You can’t be like a normal bank and say, “Okay, we will still hunt you. You have to bring the money back.” [Instead] you come together and say, “Now how do we solve this situation?” And you help them get on their feet so they are helped to pay back the old loan, but also to get a new loan. It’s a matter of being there all the time and understanding. If you are naïve and you just go up to somebody who you haven’t spoken to about a loan, who doesn’t know [your] group, who doesn’t trust you, and you say, “Here’s $100, go start a business,” then you will lose that money. There are naïve people who do that, and I think those are the ones who are spreading this dangerous message that you can’t reach the very poor—because they’ve done it the wrong way, not because you can’t reach the very poor. I invite anyone who doubts to come visit us. [Our members] are very proud, eloquent speakers who were very poor, and they can come and show you where they were, they can see and talk to the ones who are still very poor and try to convince them. In that sense I think we are a movement, a people’s own movement, more than we are an institution, a normal financial institution. But we’re still microfinance. Microcredit Summit: There are so many different things that Jamii Bora does, from housing to the “get sober” program. Please talk about another of your innovative offerings, health insurance. How did it come about, what does it cost, and what are the benefits? Ingrid Munro: In early 2001 we were one year and a few months old. We realized we had some people who were falling behind in their repayments. We decided to conduct research on all of our members; we would visit every single one of them with our staff and try to note down [their] problems. Why can you not pay back? It was such a shocking result. We found that 93 percent had the same problem: they had a patient in hospital – it means their son, their daughter, their baby, their grandchild, or their spouse, or their sister—somebody very close to [them] had to be admitted in hospital, otherwise they would die. Now, of course, you can’t expect that anyone will let their child die because they have to pay their loan to Jamii Bora. It was clear to us that this was something we could not compete with. This was something we had to solve. We went to all the insurance companies and asked, “Could you develop an insurance product for us?” They said, “Oh yes, yes.” We had 6,000 members in those days, and they thought that was a lot. But the cheapest of the cheap they could come up with was 6,000 shillings, and 6,000 shillings is about US$80 per year. And US$80 per year, if you are a single mother with five children, you see, you have to [multiply that] times six. That is a lot of money. That is way above what anyone could dream of. We then decided we’d start our own in-house product. Everyone told me, “Now Ingrid, you are killing this beautiful organization. This will pull you down. It will not work.” But we never did any research. We sat in a group of staff2 with a lot of knowledge about our members. We decided we could charge 1,000 shillings a year, which was US$12 at the time, on the condition that the members could pay every week a small amount (about 30 cents US), and they didn’t have to pay everything up front. We decided it would cover an adult member and a maximum of four dependent kids. If they had more than four kids, they would add an extra US$2 per child per year. We would cover in-patient [care], that is, treatment in hospital. If they came into hospital, we would cover everything. We started by linking up with one of the big mission hospitals in Nairobi. We said, “We’ll give you a deposit of what we think it could cost per month,” because mission hospitals cannot afford to give you services on credit. So we paid them up front. Then our members would come with a letter from us saying, “This patient has health insurance from us, and please treat her. If she has to be admitted, we will pay for everything.” There was not more research than that. The background was, “This is what our members can afford to pay, and we have to get it to work.” Over time, this has become a most incredible part of our organization. We also decided we weren’t going to ask for any donor funding, because then they would send a lot of consultants and they’d tell us it’s not possible to do what we had decided to do, and they would also say, “So-and-so should qualify and those clients should not qualify.” We wanted it to be for everybody. We decided it would cover maternity, it would cover any kind of operation, it would cover any kind of in-patient treatment, and we would not exclude people with HIV and AIDS, because then it was a useless insurance for us. And today, [in October 2007] it is soon going to be seven years that we have run this. We have always covered all our costs. We have never had any donor subsidy, not even US$1, and we have never asked for it either. I am sure we would have gotten it if we had asked. It has saved so many lives. Right now 120,000 people [are covered by the health insurance]. We have done all sorts of operations, even expensive procedures. I remember we did a hip replacement; we had to send for an artificial hip from Germany. That was a young beggar woman. She’d just given birth to a child and something went wrong. The hip was dislocated; she could not even sit up in bed. And she had three small kids. We did that hip replacement. We’ve done four open-heart surgeries. All are very young people. Two of them were under 18 and covered by their parents’ US$12 a year. We have done numerous cesarean operations in terms of maternity cases. Everything has been done, even cancer treatment.
Microcredit Summit: What about covering drugs like antiretrovirals for HIV and tuberculosis drugs? Ingrid Munro: Tuberculosis treatment is free of charge in Kenya. That’s one of the few things where the government has some donor funding, so there we link up with the government hospitals. The antiretrovirals—some of our partner hospitals have had free antiretrovirals that they can offer to a select membership. We are covering them as long as they are in the hospital. What we have found is that our microfinance combined with the health insurance is saving people from dying from AIDS. People can eat well, they can keep good nutrition. It’s very important for those who are HIV-positive, [that] they can afford the antiretrovirals, which we get at a reduced price, and that they can afford treatment in hospital when they get secondary diseases. It’s very important that they are treated right away. So it’s a combination of in-patient treatment of diseases which are quite often severe and are treated right away, and it is better nutrition so that they can afford the antiretroviral. Microcredit Summit Tell us about your life before Jamii Bora. You have broken so many rules of microfinance; what in your background and life experience has led to these breakthroughs? Ingrid Munro: In many ways I was always involved in what I thought was inequality. From my student times in the sixties, I was involved in fighting for what was right, for those who are less advantaged. And in the late sixties-early seventies, working for the government of Sweden, I got very much involved in the international work for housing for the very poor. From the late seventies I was involved in funding research for housing building and planning. In 1985 I responded to a call to come to Africa for the International Year of Shelter for the Homeless, which was a big UN campaign. I was heading that, and it was headquartered in Nairobi. That was when I was first exposed to real poverty in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. I felt like a big lump here [points to her chest]. It can’t be right. You can’t let people live like this. During that time, I came across Muhammad Yunus. My team in the UN identified Grameen Bank as the most practical way of providing financing for housing for the very poor. In 1988 the Ford Foundation paid for Muhammad Yunus to come to visit us because they felt that if we could merge these two movements – 1) housing for the very poor, slum upgrading, and building new housing in African countries and 2) Muhammad Yunus’ experience with microfinance – that would make a difference. It made a big difference to me. We walked through Mathare Valley slum with [Professor Yunus’] wife, and she was in tears because at that time, Muhammad Yunus worked with rural people only. He hadn’t been in such a bad urban slum. We sat in one of those small shacks in Mathare Valley, and he shared with the women and me how microfinance can be done. He made a huge impact on me, and for eleven years we tried, with my organization, to set up housing for the very poor in many African countries, very much inspired by Muhammad Yunus. I felt the whole time that we needed to work on people’s income. You can’t reach them with housing unless they can improve their income. When it was time for me to go home, my new-found friends in African countries asked me to stay and set up an institution to deal with housing for the very poor in Africa. I promised to stay for a little while to deal with that, and then I was asked to stay and to stay…I headed that organization for eleven years. I was at the first Microcredit Summit in Washington in 1997 as a representative of the African Housing Fund. In the mid-90’s, I had finally gotten somebody to believe that we could fund something to do with beggars – because most donors did not believe in that. I always felt that beggars were the most neglected group and that we needed to do something about their situation. I had gotten to know quite a few of them through my adopted children, because the three boys we adopted had been street kids. So [the women we worked with] were mothers of my children’s friends from the streets. I think it all came as a natural thing. Microcredit Summit: Can you say something about how adopting the three street kids came about? It seems important to the relationships you built and the lessons you learned that led to the creation of Jamii Bora. Ingrid Munro: I worked very closely with beggars and street kids, but particularly with institutions that were working with the homeless. I was the good friend of Arnold Grol, a Dutch Catholic father who worked in a Catholic church next to the Mathare Valley slum. He used to come and visit us, and we talked a lot. He was the one who first took me by the hand and brought me out into the slums when I worked in the UN. And when my now thirty-nine year old daughter graduated from high school in 1987, I thought she should do something, not just sit at home [waiting for university to start]. So she worked as a volunteer for Father Grol, and one of the things he assigned her to do was to visit a little boy called Waithaka who was at the hospital because he had been run over by a bus in the streets and he had become crippled. Father Grol was eager to save his leg. So when my daughter went to university she kept writing home and saying, “Have you given Waithaka crutches? Is he doing alright?” And when he got out of the hospital he kept running away from the Undugu Home set up by Father Grol. Waithaka was looking for his little brother Kareithi. Now he was comfortable in the home and he knew that his brother was in the streets, and he couldn’t find him. Eventually the Undugu Home gave up on Waithaka, because they thought, “This boy is nuts, he doesn’t want to stay in the home.” But they never understood that he was looking for his brother. So we said, if you find him, take him to our house, because my daughter would be very upset otherwise. So he came to us in October 1988, and he has never left us since. He is now twenty-six years old. We found his little brother three years later. Kareithi had been arrested at four years old, and he was in prison for almost four years before we found him, which was also through Father Grol. Then we found the third brother, who was a half brother. So that is how they came to us. Like all the love stories in life and in literature, they hit you and you are a helpless victim. In a little charming way, Waithaka just took us by storm. We later managed to have his legs operated on and now he walks very nicely. Microcredit Summit: And so years later, you have this relationship with women who are beggars and the mothers of Waithaka’s friends and you’re leaving the African Housing Fund. What happened next? Ingrid Munro: There was a woman called Hanna Njeri, a wonderful strong and powerful woman. She had been a beggar for twenty years and had a daughter Miriam and a son who was nicknamed Kiondo who were very close friends of Waithaka and Kareithi. Waithaka wanted to bring all the kids to our house, because he said, “We have so much space we can have a hundred children here.” So one day he took off and came home with Miriam and said, “This is my sister.” I said, “I know you don’t have a sister.” In the street the children are together and they become like brothers and sisters. I pulled in Father Grol, he said, “Miriam can’t stay here, because then everybody will come.” So my husband Bob and I started a little home together with a Baptist church in one of the slums. So these nice pastors moved out of their offices, and we turned them into bedrooms. It became like a boarding school next to their little informal school. We took in Miriam and Kiondo. Their mother came, and at first she was very aggressive. She said, “This “muzungu” (that’s the Kiswahili word for European person) has stolen my children.” But when she started seeing what we were doing, we slowly built up this close relationship with her. So we started helping her with her other kids and helping other mothers in the streets. But there is only so much you can do when you just give. At that time, even I thought you have to help them. They are so desperate; you can’t just give loans. Basically we were helping the kids. And because the kids now were in school, Hanna Njeri was becoming quite close to me. [We wanted to find donors to support this work] to start a street program. Neither the authorities nor the donors believed in it. I was very surprised about that because for a donor, that would be a dream project, to help people out of begging. Then I found the Ford Foundation, which had a wonderful [leader] named Charles Bailey and his German wife, Ingrid. Charles Bailey was very much pushed by his wife, who said, “If you cannot support Ingrid with this, I don’t think the Ford Foundation should even be here.” He brought some of the high level staff from New York and came to visit with Hanna Njeri and a few other beggars. We took them around and they interviewed beggars on the street. They even invited us for breakfast. Hanna was there and three of the other beggars and she said to me, “I’ve been a beggar outside the Hilton for twenty years, but I’ve never been inside. Now I’m somebody.” After those interviews, the Ford Foundation believed in [what we were trying to do], and we started a project that we called the Urban Destitute Project in the African Housing Fund with small grants from the Ford Foundation. We were first thinking of education, helping them into what we called the Shelter Link Program. Families that had taken loans from the African Housing Fund can rent out a room to a beggar and be the mentor of that beggar family and at the same time as they got some income that helped them pay back their loans to us. So that was our first Shelter Link Program. It had just started as I was retiring. That’s why they said, “Not now, Mom, you can’t abandon us. What’s going to happen to us? We are going to be thrown out. Nobody believes in us. This project won’t continue.” It’s how everything started. You see, it’s a natural development that was meant to be, I think. Microcredit Summit: And so what was the next step? You have just retired and the women say to you, “No, you can’t leave now, no one else believes in us.” Ingrid Munro: Well, as I was retired I had time, so I spent all my time with them. I taught them how to write receipts, and we developed our ideas on how to do this. We said, “You have to start saving a bit of money.” Because one thing I’ve really learned during my years in Africa is that you can’t lift anybody out of poverty, because [when] you lift them, you say “I’m paying your school fees, I’m paying your food, I’m paying your rent. You’re not poor anymore and all the others are poor down there because I am not lifting them.” But the minute you leave, they will fall down and really hurt themselves. I’ve seen many beggars, who actually once or twice were in such well intended projects run by a diplomat’s wife teaching them weaving or something like that. And when they fall back in the streets, they have lost part of their survival skills. So sometimes very well intended and wonderful projects can destroy the poor more than help them. So I was tough; I said, “You have to save a little bit of money. Unless you do something yourself, I’m not going to do anything. For every shilling you save, I promise I will find someone who will give us two shillings. I promised to double the money they had saved, and then we would use that to lend to them.
Microcredit Summit: How much were they saving each week?
Ingrid Munro: At best they were saving fifty shillings. In a week
they would save about fifty cents, sixty cents. They would save five cents
one day, ten cents another day from their begging. They said “The most
difficult thing was [finding a place] to keep that money, because if I save
some money and I have some cents in my pocket, when I sleep in the streets
someone will steal it from me. And that somebody could even be my own son,
who needs money for drinking or whatever.”
We opened a bank account. At first nobody wanted to open a bank account because these women couldn’t write, and I didn’t want to be the one signing for them for the account. When ABN Amro first accepted the bank account I came in with a homemade bag full of coins and a few notes. In those days there were five shilling and ten shilling notes, but we don’t have them anymore. They were sticky and dirty and rolled up, because the women used to hide the money in their shoes, in their bras, even in their underwear, where it was safe and nobody could take it from them. When I came to the bank and poured out this money they said, “You really need this account, don’t you.”
That’s how we started. I had trained the women to do this so they would become their own bank. But the group grew like a bushfire. The word went around in the slum, “Mom is back, Mom is back. We can do something, we are doing something. Do you want to join us?” So we had to formalize this. We started a foundation, and we called it Jamii Bora trust. We had originally wanted to call it Tumine Trust, because Tumine is a word that means “new hope.” It is a very important word in Kenya. But there was already another trust named Tumine Trust, so we had to come up with another name quickly, and we sat in my garden with a few of the women. They were talking about how they were treated badly and how nobody believes in them. One woman said to me, “You know, Mom, you are the only one who understands that we are also good mothers. We love our children, we are also good families.” And that’s when the name came up. I said, “Of course you are. Why don’t we call ourselves that?” And that’s how Jamii Bora came up. It means ‘good families.’
Microcredit Summit: And from these fifty cents a week savings, the
first loans were given. What about your promise to find someone who, for
every shilling they save, will give them two shillings?
Ingrid Munro: The first time that I could live up to my promise was
because of Johannes Sannesmoen, a Norwegian gentleman I had known from
before his time with the Strømme Foundation. Johannes was on a mission in
Kenya and Uganda, and he heard me talk about the beggars. He said “I want
to come and meet them.” He had heard about my promise, and so he said,
“How much do you think they had saved?” I told him it could be close to
8,000 shillings, about US$100 at that time. That was the original group of
fifty beggars.
He said, “I have no authority to give any money – we haven’t discussed this at home – but I will give you some money from my per diem.” So he came and I said, “I have a friend from Norway. Remember I told you that for every shilling you save I will find someone that will give us two shillings.”
Johannes asked the treasurer, Margaret Kanyah, “How much do you have?” Johannes is an accountant by profession, so he said, “Let me see your book.” She had a little exercise book where she had written and they had 8,000 shillings.
“How much should I give now if I am to follow Mom’s promise (that she will bring twice as many) shillings and cents?” he asked. They all knew the answer, even though they were illiterate. They said, “Sixteen!” He pulled out his wallet, and he said, “1,000…2,000…3,000.” There were all these women sitting on the ground outside the Catholic church, and their eyes went like this [widens eyes].
They still remember that to this day, because that was the only time they’d ever seen Mom get real money. Other than a check or a bank transfer, they don’t see it. Now here they saw it, and it was such a wonderful presentation of the truth in this promise. From there on we’ve had people coming in, but our first donation was a grant, and it was US$100, and that had a huge impact on the women. I’m told that when Johannes returned to the Strømme Foundation and told the story he had tears in his eyes.
Microcredit Summit: What was the size of the loans and how were
they using the first loans?
Ingrid Munro: The usual size was about five dollars. They would buy vegetables to sell and earn a few cents extra on that. It was sort of a daily cycle, you know—you sell the vegetables you have, and you eat what is left over. Then you buy a new stock in the morning to sell. So they paid back the first loans, many in four weeks. They saved money now, earning a lot of money compared with what they were used to. Then they saved more out of that, and now they could borrow twice as much. That’s how they grew.
When some of them started taking loans and when the others saw that, they got very encouraged by it. Now more and more of them wanted to borrow, and more and more came and joined us as members. It became a full time job, and I started hiring some of the former beggars as staff. We were still working out of my house, and the staff that were from the same areas would come to my house, and I came to them. We didn’t have any place to meet so we used to meet outside the Catholic church in Soweto slum. The nice Fathers didn’t want us inside the hall because the women were too rowdy and too noisy, and there were always some of them who were drunk and wanted to talk all the time.
Microcredit Summit: Give us the statistics in October 2007 and your goals for the future.
Ingrid Munro: What started with fifty beggars in 1999 has grown in October 2007 to 170,000 members, who all save to be able to borrow. Some save between two loans because they want to take a bigger loan next time, and about 60,000 are borrowers at any one time. Our experience is they don’t borrow the whole time. Loans are not always necessary when they come to a certain level in their business—they go on with what they earn from the business, they buy the next stock with that, and when they want to take the next leap, they take another loan. We have given out US$28 million in loans between 1999 and 2007, and we have between US$6 and US$7 million in loans in October 2007. We have grown to be the largest microfinance organization in Kenya, and yet we are supporting the poorest of the poor. Now we think we are ready to grow. We have held back growth a bit because we needed a new management information system (MIS) in place. We needed the technology to be networked with the whole country, which we now have, and we have reached twenty-five percent of all the households in two of Kenya’s worst slum areas. Now let’s make that our target for the whole country—to reach twenty-five percent of the households; 1.5 million households in ten years. But many of us think we should reach those households sooner than in ten years, and we think it’s possible.
Microcredit Summit: I didn’t intend to ask this but…you’d not taken your first savings at the time of the first Microcredit Summit in 1997. Any brief reactions to that particular summit?
Ingrid Munro: I had my housing hat on, and we gave out housing loans and even loans for water wells. And I thought that the Summit was fantastic, that’s when I realized what you were doing—your Campaign—was fantastic. I was there when we stood up and applauded Muhammad Yunus. I was there and heard President Museveni—“If you don’t build roads and you don’t build the infrastructure, don’t talk about microfinance.” It was a very big event.
The Mathare slum, where many of Jamii Bora’s clients are, is one of the areas most devastated by the post-election violence in January, 2008. If you would like to make a contribution to the Microcredit Summit Campaign’s Kenya Crisis Recovery Fund, please click here.
For more information about Jamii Bora, please visit their website.
1RESULTS is an
international citizens’ lobbying organization whose purpose is to create the
political will to end hunger and the worst aspects of poverty
(www.results.org). The
Microcredit Summit Campaign is a project of RESULTS Educational Fund. 2All of Jamii Bora’s
staff are current or former members. |
