Income Generation

Care For Life's work in Mozambique is centered around the Family Preservation Program, which helps families in rural communities with health, hygiene, cleanliness, and more. One of the areas in which Care For Life works is Income Generation--working with families to plant gardens or utilize other skills to start and maintain a small business that could bring in a little bit of extra income.

Care for Life is especially interested now in creating some sort of savings and credit program for these communities, so that the people will have a place to save money and/or take out loans for these small businesses. To give you some idea, when people try and get a loan from the bank, the interest rate can be around 40%--you borrow 100 Meticais, you have to pay back 140 next month. When they try and borrow from a neighbor or friend, the interest rate is 50%. Insane! Obviously, this deters most people from getting loans. CFL would like to make low-interest loans available to budding entrepreneurs. Part of my work here this summer is to visit the communities, talk to the people, and begin to think about what this could look like.

So for the last three days, I've been visiting communities with members of the CFL team to talk with families that already have small businesses, or would be interested in starting a small business to get a little bit of extra money. Talking with these people for even a few minutes, I am amazed, shocked, and inspired.

Albertina is an elderly woman who really wants to start a banana business--buying bananas closer to downtown and bringing them to her rural community to sell

Money needed to start her business: 100 Meticais (about $3.00)

Joana is a widow who takes care of six grandchildren because most of their mothers (her daughters) died in childbirth. The only income she has is from selling wine, which brings in about 150 MT ($5) every two weeks. Every day she travels outside of the village to tend to her garden, which is the only way she is able to take care of her family. She would love to expand her offerings to include other drinks that are in greater demand.

Money needed to expand her business: 1000 MT (about $34)

Three years ago, a Care For Life worker kept pressing Jordino to create his own business. Almost as a joke, he started selling stuff out of his front yard. Now he has a thriving corner store, where he sells oil, crackers, biscuits, drinks, detergent, and other general goods.

Money to start his business: 1250 MT ($41)

And my favorite story. Torres is the neatest 14-year-old entrepreneur. He really wanted to buy a cell phone (the model he wants costs about 1200 MT, $30), so he asked his dad for some money. He went to the beach, bought some fish, and began to sell it out of his front yard. Now he's got an income of 200 MT (about $6) about every 10 days. Now he gives money to his parents sometimes to help out. He's almost got enough saved to buy his cell phone.

Money needed to start Torres' business: 300 MT ($10)

This is incredible to me. First, it's inspiring to hear these stories and others of people starting a little business from almost nothing and creating for themselves a small but significant amount of income. What's shocking is how little is needed to help them get started ($3 for Albertina to start her banana business! $10 for Torres's fish!), but so many can't because they don't have that money, and they can't afford to borrow at the outrageous interest rates available to them. Hopefully my work with Income Generation can find ways to make credit more readily available to these wonderful entrepreneurs.