Empowering Women
Robin Ratcliffe, Vice President, Communications, ACCION International
![[Ratcliffe]](http://www.microcreditsummit.org/newsletter/ratcliffe.jpg)
ACCION International, a microenterprise practitioner, has affiliates in Latin America and the United States.
I will focus on policies that can enable microenterprise institutions to reach women, especially very poor women, more effectively.
The first policy... is speaking the language of women.... For example, loan officers or loan advisors need to speak their language, literally. In BancoSol in Bolivia, for example, it’s much more important for loan officers to speak Quechua or Aymara than Spanish, because the poorest women who have not attended school may speak no [Spanish] or very limited Spanish. Obviously, if you cannot speak to a woman in her own dialect or her own language, you’ve already got an enormous strike against you in reaching her and being of service to her.
Also in terms of speaking the language, you must understand the constraints under which women operate.... Throughout the world, women continue to be responsible for more than 90 percent of domestic and child care responsibilities. Certainly that’s the case in Latin America.... Therefore, it’s really important for microenterprise institutions to design the loan product, and particularly the [application] process, to respond to women’s needs: small loans, very simple application processes that definitely do not require being literate, short terms and very short waiting times [or] turn around times, and even lower opportunity costs in the loan process than in a male-oriented program.
Policy two: Understand women’s work.... Microfinance institutions need to understand how women look at their work, how they manage their microenterprises, and how they spend their increased income.... ACCION conducted a study, funded by UNIFEM, which interviewed over 600 women in five countries in Latin America and slightly over 200 men.... The findings were as follows: Because women take care of the children and do almost all the housework, they spend less time on their microenterprises than men. Their enterprises are in reality less productive. That doesn’t mean they’re less talented. It means that with the constraints on their time, the microenterprises are less productive because of [several] things: they have less experience in running a business, less training in running a business, and they are combining it with significant child care and household responsibilities. The women in this study were found to invest less of their profits in the business itself. Instead, they invest their profits in their children and in their families. Women don’t drink or gamble or otherwise fritter away their profits. They put it back in their business, and they definitely put it back in the well-being of their children, both in nutrition and schooling, and in housing. In our particular study in Latin America, it was interesting to note that the rate of repayment on loans was quite similar between men and women.... If you want to understand women’s work, do not generalize across countries and cultures. Each institution must commit to understanding the status of women in its own region.
Look at your staff within the microenterprise institution. Number one: Hire more women as senior managers.... Many organizations are not only run by men, but they have not offered women important positions in the management structure. There is really no better way... to make a microenterprise development institution gender-oriented than to have women in strong management positions. Women are by nature more likely to set the agenda of looking at gender issues, and women will more easily mentor other women within the organization.
ACCION has not found it necessary to specifically target women because it has created loan products which directly address women’s barriers to credit, low literacy, and limited free time, with simplified paperwork and quick service.
Training staff: Loan officers, middle management—everyone within a microfinance institution—needs training in gender. Discover if, within your own staff, you’re limited by thinking that might not appear on the surface but that still exists—negative gender thinking.... Circulate a questionnaire about women and find out, in reality, what your staff thinks....
[However], hiring women loan officers... is not necessarily the solution to this issue. In many countries, women are at risk working alone in poor neighborhoods.... It’s very important to increase the consciousness of male loan officers, to make them gender experts....
Keep data on gender and disseminate it widely. Microenterprise institutions must not be content only with reaching women. They must play a role in changing the way policy makers perceive and understand why empowering women leads to a healthier and stronger society, period.
Helen Todd, Editor, CASHPOR
![[Todd]](http://www.microcreditsummit.org/newsletter/todd.jpg)
CASHPOR is a network of Grameen Bank replications. They provide training, technical assistance, and information to their members. CASHPOR also promotes new replications.
I want to start first by telling you a story.... I was visiting an MFI [microfinance institution] in Nepal. David Gibbons and I were doing an evaluation of that program, so they were, of course, keen to show us their best borrowers. I was taken to the house of a woman who had borrowed three times from this program.... The loans had gone into a grocery business. As soon as I started asking questions about the grocery business, the husband made all the answers.... Whenever I directed the question at the woman borrower, she had no idea what was going on. The household was doing well. Their income had almost doubled. They had more assets. It was a typical kind of success story.
Then I followed the woman into the house.... When we got there, she started crying; I asked what was wrong. It turned out that her husband, because he had been so successful and because he was earning more money, had taken a second wife, who had been brought into the household just a few months before. The first wife had been shunted downstairs to sleep with the mother-in-law....
Quite apart from the heartache involved in that situation for the woman client, there is a very strong economic angle. The second wife will have children. Whatever increased income that came from that loan will be distributed amongst more people. When I went out, I said to the branch manager that I was with, “Do you really think that that woman has benefited from the loan?” He got very angry with me. He could not see there could be a difference between his client’s individual interests and those of the household. And he was very defensive to the idea that the program could efficiently disburse loans and get repayment, but the impact might not be there in some cases....
It became quite clear to me, in the work that we did in Tangail in Bangladesh with long-term Grameen Bank borrowers, that the most successful families in our small sample were those husbands and wives working in partnership, where both were major economic actors....
When I studied this, it was a small sample of 40 long-term Grameen Bank borrowers [described in Women at the Center, Westview, 1996]. I found that 10 of them, in other words 25 percent, had little or no control over the use of their loans. They were just taking the money and pipelining it to a husband, a son, a father-in-law, or some other male within the household — sometimes a male outside the household, which was an even more exploitative situation.
Another study by Goetz and Gupta [World Development, January, 1996] which was done about the same time as mine,... studied four microcredit programs in Bangladesh, and this is what they found: Those women who had little or no control over the use of their loan: In Grameen Bank it was 10 percent, a much lower finding than mine; with BRAC, 45 percent had little or no control; in TMSS, 38 percent; and in RD-12, which is a government credit program, 63 percent had little or no control. The overall average that they found was 39 percent. You will agree with me that is not acceptable.
People are using this study... to argue that there is less benefit to opening microcredit opportunities to women than the “evangelists” say.... That is not the way I interpret this study. Thirty-nine percent having little or no control means that 61 percent have partial or full control. That is a lot better than the kind of powerlessness with which these women begin.
There is another more useful way to look at these figures. If there is, in one country - Bangladesh - within one culture, this huge variation between 10 percent and 63 percent in terms of empowerment,... then we have got to look at how those programs are designed and try to figure out what are the processes [and] what are the mechanisms in that program which are encouraging or discouraging women’s own loan use?...
I think one of the most important ways of encouraging women’s empowerment is by having simple structures that they can operate and understand - like the group and center structure in the Grameen Bank - so that the women can own the center themselves, so that they can operate it, so that there are rules that they can understand and can follow and can operate themselves. If somebody, be it a staff member or somebody else, tries to bend those rules, they know how to get around that and what to do.
There [should be] transparent conduct of business - that business takes place openly in the village so that there’s less possibility for corruption. Corruption often means exploitation of somebody in the group.
And there [should be] homogeneous groups: If you have better-off women in the group, or much older women in the group, they will generally dominate and exploit other women....
Mechanisms that you can use to encourage women’s own loan use... are sometimes... already in the program, and you just need to implement them more effectively. For example, in the Grameen Bank system, they have a loan utilization check, which is done by both the head of the group, the head of the center, and the staff member who’s servicing that center. It’s important in the early years of the program to do this very thoroughly, and for it to be done by staff members who are sensitive to this issue. That may mean - particularly if you have predominantly male staff members - that you may have to give a few workshops to your staff.
The motivation work that goes on in the client training sessions [should] emphasize that the women should be economic actors: This is their right and their responsibility as borrowers. You try to build a culture of economic enterprise amongst your women clients.
In the CASHPOR India program, which has just begun in Mirzapur, we are thinking that there should actually be penalties for women who pipeline loans to males. I don’t mean punitive things. Men are much less interested in very small loans.... If you know that the man is taking the loan, then in the next cycle the loan should be smaller, so that it is less tempting for him and as small as possible so that, in the judgement of her group, she has the capacity to use it, and then build up her confidence so that she can continue to make use of the loan when it gets larger....
Muhammad Yunus, Managing Director, Grameen Bank
![[Yunus]](http://www.microcreditsummit.org/newsletter/bestyunus.jpg)
Grameen Bank was founded in 1976 to alleviate poverty and hunger. It currently serves 2.3 million borrowers in Bangladesh.
Nurjahan and Jannat are the two students who worked with me while I was trying to do something in the next door village.... I could not communicate with the women in the village, because they would not see me. If I had to tell them what I had in mind, [Nurjahan or Jannat] would go inside the house, explain what I said, get their response, come out, while I’m waiting under the tree, and explain what their questions are. I would tell them what I had to say. This is how our work began....
When they [Nurjahan and Jannat] took up the jobs, they couldn’t tell their families they were working. Because as a Muslim girl, you are not supposed to work. You are getting a master’s degree, but then wait for getting married. Nurjahan had to hide from her family that she worked for an experimental project that required her to go door-to-door to poor families in the village on foot....
When we tried to reach out to women, giving loans to them, the women themselves didn’t think that they should be taking the money. They always said, “Why didn’t you give it to my husband?” This was the starting point.... We worked very hard to bring women into it....
What happens if Grameen borrowers get some money? Do they really establish control over the assets and whatever they have acquired with it?... Our housing loan is like this: You have to have three one-year loans, and when you successfully complete that, then you are entitled to take a housing loan. Our housing loan is US$300.... But we cannot give a housing loan to a woman, or any Grameen borrower, unless she or he can produce the ownership title to the bank showing that yes, the piece of land on which she is going to build the house belongs to her. Of course, she doesn’t own the land because she is in her husband’s house. Her husband owns the land.... She has to open up the subject with her husband, “What do we do? Do we want a house? If we want a house, only way you can do this, you have to hand over the title of the land to me.” This is quite a shocking thing for the husband to hear.... But the need for housing is so much, they come around it. They agree, sign,... go to the government office which is responsible for transferring ownership of land.... Then she brings the ownership document to the bank and says, “Now, I am applying for the housing loan.” We have given more than 400,000 housing loans. In every single case, it is the woman who is the borrower, she is the owner of the land and the house....
Divorcing wives is a very common practice, particularly among the poor. Our divorce procedure is so simple. All you need to say is “I divorce you” three times, and it’s done. It’s irrevocable... even if he regrets that.... When you get angry, the first thing you do, you start shouting “I divorce you” three times, and it is done.... But when the housing loan comes, and you build a new house, and the same family lives under that house, the husband, even in his utmost anger, doesn’t utter that sentence, because he realizes that after saying that, it is he who has to go out of the house....
We wanted to make sure [of] 100 percent voting by the Grameen family during election time.... We had a big national election in 1991. So we campaigned. The borrowers didn’t feel very excited at all about voting. The message that came back to us was, “Why vote?... No matter who you vote for, they’re all devils.” We see there is a complete absence of enthusiasm about it.... Can we not enthuse them to come and participate in elections? After a lot of discussion among ourselves, we changed our policy when we went back again. “Yes, you’re right, they’re all devils. But if you don’t vote, the worst of the devils will get elected.... If you are careful, discuss among yourselves who might be the least of devils, you might live better with the least of the devils.” That immediately caught their imagination.... Then we gave the exercise to discuss who is a devil, and how you classify the devil, and who is the least devil....
In the ’91 election, we really succeeded in ensuring 100 percent participation in the election by the family members of Grameen. It was very elaborate.... The entire Grameen Center, along with the adults and the children and the infants, must assemble together in the center house and proceed to the election booth together, before anybody else has had a chance to arrive yet.... The whole village watches, because no one else is going there yet.... It’s important because you feel strong because we are going there together. Politicians will start noticing you.... Next time around they will come to you first, because they know you are in a block. You’ll go and vote for somebody....
1996 had another general election. We mobilized the same thing, but added a little piece more.... This time we also bring our neighbors - particularly the women neighbors.... The ’96 election is a landmark. Voter participation in that election was 73 percent for the whole country - that’s unusually high. Mostly what surprised us [was that] more women voted in that election than men, for the first time in Bangladesh history.... [There] are separate polling booths for men and for women. This is the traditional arrangement. What arrangements are done for men, for women it is usually half the arrangements, because women come in half or less than half the number.... Now that they came in much larger numbers,... the women’s line was longer and longer in each place. But they did not quit their position. They stayed in line for hours, holding their babies, holding the children. They didn’t quit....
In ’97 [we had] the local government election. We repeated the same thing.... When the election results came out, that surprised us. Many of the Grameen borrowers got elected in the election. We went around [and] asked them, “Why did you do it?” They said, “Didn’t you tell us, look for the least of the devils? If you can find good people, vote for them. Then we tried to debate, discuss, [and] we thought all were devils. Then some of us began talking. Why are we looking for them? We can run ourselves, we are good people. We are together, we all vote, and we all get elected.” More than 4,000 Grameen borrowers got elected in the local elections. Thirty-eight Grameen borrowers got elected to become the heads of the local government....
