Women ending poverty: WORTH notes from the field

Elizabeth Kucinich, wife of 2008 presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich, hosted by WORTH groups in Uganda

Last month WORTH women in Uganda invited Elizabeth Kucinich, wife of American Democratic Congressman and 2008 presidental hopeful Dennis Kucinich, into their groups to learn about WORTHs unique model and the amazing results of their participation in the WORTH program.

Upon her return to the U.S., Mrs. Kucinich wrote the following account about her most recent trip to Africa and particularly about the WORTH program on her own blog.

        "As you may already know, I lived for 16 months in East Africa, in a village of subsistence farmers. There was no electricity and no water bore hole in the village, and I loved it. I learned to value and respect the ‘peasant’ culture of self reliance, community, respect for the environment and freedom from the tyranny of an industrial society with its constant economic demands. There I learned a great deal about the industry of international development and experienced for myself the tremendous Western disparity and confusion between the simplicity of the lifestyle of peasant culture and the label of poverty. Something I am working very hard to remedy, working to create opportunities for peace, prosperity and a healthy environment to flourish, without destroying a valuable way of life that we in the West should be learning from.

It is with this heart that I flew to Uganda to visit some women’s groups in villages in the Mbale region. These communities have benefitted from a WORTH, a women’s empowerment and savings based microfinance program that was developed in Nepal with the help of a wonderful lady called Marcia Odell and her husband Malcolm who encouraged her to use ‘Appreciative Inquiry’ a method that instead of looking at problems and solutions, looks at how we can strengthen our strengths so our weaknesses fall into insignificance. WORTH is now in eight different countries, serving hundreds of thousands of women through their empowerment and education, providing them with the skills to run their own community banks and strengthen their communities through micro-enterprise, education and basic community led savings and loans services.

It took three and a half hours to make the drive from Kampala to Mbale and then about an hour driving into the rural villages to meet with one of the groups of 25 women who were running their own WORTH microfinance savings group. They meet each week to learn literacy, skills in micro enterprise and community banking, as well as to save together and lend their collective savings to one another at 2% interest, so that each member of the group has the benefit of the use of capital to start and develop their enterprise...

I spoke to one lady who explained the value of WORTH to her and her family. She had 14 children of her own and was now looking after her brother’s five children, after he and his wife had passed away due to AIDS. Through the ethic of the WORTH model, with emphasis on group support and strengthening, community empowerment through women’s empowerment, education and microfinance through the mobilization of savings, this previously illiterate women with little hope to support nineteen dependents explained how she could now clothe them, feed them and send some of them to school. A dream come true. Her microenterprise started after joining the WORTH group and realized that people had to go great distances to buy medicine. She took out a loan from the community’s joint savings and invested in a small number of medicines. She set up a little stall in the village and sold the medicine to those who needed it. She used her profits to pay back her loan and to buy a larger stock of medicine. She now has a thriving business that provides affordable medicine to the community and now advises people on aspects of healthcare. She supports nineteen dependents using a mixture of her income from her microenterprise and the produce from the land she and her family farm.

According to a recent government report, 1 in 8 people in America live below the official poverty line of $19,971 per year for a family of four. Over 97 million live on less that twice this level and all those are without adequate healthcare. 50% of bankruptcies are due to healthcare costs. Having come from a country with a tremendous national healthcare service, I am astounded that America of all places still does not serve its people with this most basic need. Whilst Dennis and I strive for the transformation of the health industry to become a health service and for sane economic practices which enable equity rather than debt, it is my dream to for those models that are working in the ‘Global South’, namely WORTH to help those in need in the ‘Global North’ who in many cases suffer great levels of poverty through systemic faults (which Dennis and I are working to correct), which can be overcome to some degree through community networks and empowerment. It is the responsibility of us all to encourage and facilitate the creation of systems of education and economy that provide communities with the skills to employ their own enterprise to secure the fulfillment of the needs of their families."

WORTH women in Uganda have a lot to celebrate

In Uganda, we've had several great success stories to share this month. Groups are reading Selling Made Simple - the third book in the Women in Business series - and are working to increase the strength and success of their microbusinesses. Having a firm handle on village banking skills, women are managing flourishing village banks and looking forward to the end of their first banking cycle when interest is calculated. Several groups have self-replicated based on the good example of formal WORTH groups in their areas.

I was on my way back from the field on the May 3rd, when I saw a group of people with Our Group - the first book in the Women in Business series. Seeing these women prompted me to stop and learn more. This group had been replicated in the Namuela village, within the Butemulani cluster. Clementina Azemwa (third from the right) confidently shares this about her experience with WORTH:

"I was not an official member of any group but I was impressed by the content and use of lumasaba in this book, so I asked Nabutuwa Teopista of the Butemulani women's group to lend me her copy. I then started my own WORTH group. Besides me are my daughters in law Mutuwa Scovia,Celina Namweke, Nabuduwa Jennipher, and my grand children Sarah Mutonyi and Wokunyanya Malika - a boy whom I teach Lumasaba with the aid of this book."

This is proof of the amazing impact of WORTH activities in the Mbale area.

Another WORTH group doing wonderful things is the Namutambo Womens group. Here the involvement of the group officers is improving day by day and the group has noticed! They continue to save regularly - confident in their management team - and they have reelected the committee members for a following year. They attribute their success to their Empowerment Worker Jesca Khainza and to the District Director of Women Ministries, Major Sarah Wandulu.  A group member,  Kisakye, had this to say about WORTH, “Most of the women in this group are members of the league of the mercy church ministry and they had given up coming to WORTH group meetings for their church meetings. But, when I talked to them about the benefits of WORTH, they started saving and now have 10 active members. Four members have taken loans totaling Ushs.25,000 ($15.16USD,) and they have a balance of Ushs.80,000 ($50.00USD) in the cash box that they will loan out next week.”

The group meets on Wednesdays at Soono Salvation Army church and they promised to continue the reading and saving program as per the WORTH model.

Finally, a blind woman - Simuya Lusyana - had this to say about WORTH:

“My name is Simiyu Lusyana. I am a 34 year-old widow, and a resident of Bumuyonga village in Namicha. My husband died in 2005 leaving me with two children, Rebecca Nderema and Mary Carolyn Hatete - aged 6 and 13 respectively. Life has been challenging from the time my husband died. It has been hard to provide for my children in terms of clothing, shelter and food. It is not possible for me to go back to my parents in Karamoja for help, so I joined the WORTH program in my community. Meeting with the women in my group brings me encouragement and emotional support. Sometimes they even collect some extra money for me to use for feeding.”

The Namicha women's group has been helping this woman meet her basic needs as well as recover from grief and stigma after the death of her husband who was HIV positive. The group hopes to help Simiyu start a small business to earn her own income, and become self-sufficient.

-Jane Wanyama
WORTH Coordinator
Mbale, Uganda

For more information about WORTH, please visit our website at: http://www.worthwomen.org

 

The ordinary: beyond extraordinary

"I’ve just returned from a full-packed week in Mbale, Uganda after a one-week Management Committee Training in Nazareth, Ethiopia.  Before we got down to model discussion and further training, the Uganda team had organized two days of “surprise” field visits where we appeared unannounced in front of startled and often flustered groups.  Ugandans, usually so hospitable, were dismayed that visitors had arrived who they had not had time to prepare a song, a dance or a small meal for. We squeezed ourselves into the Treasurer’s house of the first group and I soon found myself sitting on the dirt floor, legs stretched out in front of me, hands in the hands of the women sitting next to me as they went about the business of paying their weekly savings and loan payments.  Five women were making loan installment payments that day on business such as wholesale fruit and vegetable stalls, mandazi selling (a sweet fried dough) and school uniform tailoring.  Each woman spoke about how she had been able to start or improve her business through taking her loan from the group and passbooks were shyly passed around showing the total amount that each woman had saved. The Management Committee proudly brought forward their rough, hand-made cash box and produced the 3 keys that kept their money safe.  It was the biggest cash box I had ever seen!  They laughed that they were expecting lots of money to come to their group and so they wanted to be prepared. We read the opening pages of “Road to Wealth”, the second WORTH book, in Lugisu and the woman sharing her book with me patiently helped me sound out the words in an unknown language.  She told me she had also had troubles at the beginning.  

These women were changing their lives- right there in the two room house they crowded into every week. In a way they were nothing but an ordinary group, hundreds of similar groups were meeting throughout these hills every week. Some of the other groups we visited were made up of HIV positive women, joining together to fight stigma and make a better life for their families.  Another group had adopted a baby girl abandoned in the marketplace. This group hadn’t done anything heroic or noteworthy in their community- yet. But when I looked at the faces of the women sitting around me I was struck by precisely how Unordinary each woman was as she smiled and hoped and committed herself to her group and to her future.  Sometimes the ordinary can be the thing that moves you the most."

~Erica Tubbs, WORTH Technical Advisor

For more information about WORTH, please visit our website at: http://www.worthwomen.org