Income Generation 2

Besides interviewing budding entrepreneurs, I have also attended one of the Income Generation classes and sat in many meetings about how we can best achieve Care For Life’s goals of promoting self-reliance and alleviating suffering. We’ve toured a facility that makes coal stoves and also houses other small business ventures. One of the things we wanted to do is design a sort of savings program or mini-credit union that communities could implement in order to receive the advantages of joining funds, depositing money, and taking out loans.

Today was the culmination of the our efforts over the last three weeks. We selected two zones (about 30 families) in the community of Ngupa 2 to start an association. One of the zone leaders, Papa Marques, has been a great ally for us, and very excited about the program. He’s a real go-getter, and serves as a great help for CFL. For the whole morning before we got there, he was out knocking doors rounding up people for the meeting.

We were able to share our vision about what an association is, and I explained to them wat I thought were the benefits of being part of an association (which Marques then translated into dialect for me). An association is a legal group that usually has a bank account where members can deposit money and also take out loans. Because taking out loans is next to impossible here (the interest rates can be 50%), this is a pretty big deal.

The people got pretty excited about the idea, and several shared with me the business ideas they had that could be realized with a small, low-interest loan. After our discussion, Margues and Margarida wrote down the names of those people interested in joining (thirty-three!), and we even elected honorary officers until the association could be officially legalized. These people, and the members, will meet together to discuss what the association will look like, how people will borrow, and the difficult question of how to ensure people pay back their loans. When all of this is ready, I have offered some of my funds to start the association.

I told the villagers gathered there that they are pioneers. This will be the first association of its kind in the community, or any of the communities where Care For Life works. As such, they’re almost surely be hiccups along the way, and obstacles to overcome. Yet they can rejoice through their experience, not only will they be blessed, but also Care For Life will learn valuable lessons and better be able to help others in the future.