unitex@rubbs.fidonet.org (unitex) (09/23/89)
MALAWI: Help For Women Entrepreneurs
Blantyre, September 21, 1989 (AIA/Melinda Ham) -- After
years of struggle some women here are gaining economic
independence. The success has come with recent initiatives
promoting women's businesses and giving women access to
loans without a male guarantor.
The development is challenging the traditional image of women
as possessions of their husbands and male relatives and as
baby-machines and unpaid labourers.
Two organisations are facilitating the change - the
Development of Malawi Traders Trust (DEMATT) and the Small
Enterprise Development Organisation of Malawi (SEDOM).
DEMATT - the main small business advisory service - launched
a programme in July in the north, south and centre of the
country for the first time ever targetted only at women.
The most recent national statistical survey in 1977 said only
two percent of working women were self employed. But DEMATT
is urging women to start their own businesses and take
out loans from SEDOM.
Banks only give women loans if they have a man as a
guarantor. Men control all the families' possessions, so
women have no collateral. SEDOM is the only financial
institution in the country without this stipulation.
"If the man is the guarantor, he often feels he can decide
how the loan is spent," says one foreign aid official.
"Women will never progress sufficently until they can be
financially independent."
In Malawi, most families depend on more than one source of
income to survive. More than half of farmers do not produce
enough food to subsist and the minimum wage in the urban
areas is only 84 Canadian cents a day.
Official statistics show that almost one in three families is
headed solely by a woman who is unmarried, divorced or
married to a polygamous man. Her husband may have died, or
left to find work in the urban areas. So although
traditionally men search for alternative income, the
responsibility often falls on women.
As in most of Africa, Malawian women do more than 70 percent
of the farming and all the housework, but for generations
they have also brewed maize beer, sold firewood and worked
for other people to earn extra cash.
Starting in 1981, the Ministry of Agriculture began providing
loans to groups of women to establish their own income-
generating activities (IGAs). Now more than 500 women's IGA
groups have sprung up across the country selling cash crops,
livestock, poultry or dairy products.
The Ministry of Community Services also started several pilot
IGAs assisted by the German development agency GTZ to provide
labour saving technology, such as maize mills or groundnut
oil extraction projects.
DEMATT's Women's Programme Co-ordinator Nellie Nyang'wa says,
"The difference between IGAs and small businesses is that the
IGAs' main purpose is to provide immediate short-term income
to a group or community, while a business' purpose is
continued profit and to generate income to an individual
rather than a group."
DEMATT began its new women's programme with three-quarters of
a million dollars of financial and technical assistance from
the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the UN
Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO).
It held promotional seminars in the three regions of the
country, each attended by at least 70 women and several
curious entrepreneurs.
In August and September, they are receiving basic training in
accounting and business management as well as doing "hands
on" market research before they submit a detailed business
plan to SEDOM for a loan.
Businesses considered viable include hair salons, a petrol
station, tailoring and soap-making projects, restaurants and
bakeries.
Lele Masala-Banda wants to start a restaurant. Her husband
has just retired from teaching and their family of seven
children desperately needs another source of income. As part
of her market research, Masala-Banda visited other
restaurants in her area.
"All of them had the same menu and the food was served in a
very unappetising way," she says, "so I am confident I can
do much better and attract many more customers."
She travelled around the region finding out the price of all
items she will need, from potatoes to pots to material for
her waitresses' uniforms.
Illiteracy is a common problem for women entrepreneurs as
only 30 percent of adult women are literate in Malawi,
according to a 1980 UNICEF report.
Gaining confidence after being considered a lower status than
men for so long is another obstacle women must overcome.
Convincing their husbands that they are capable of running a
business alone is another obstacle.
DEMATT field workers said several women came to the first
seminar but did not return for subsequent ones because their
husbands had forbidden them to attend.
Betha Kumitete has been selling "mbaula" (Chichewa for
charcoal burning stoves) for more than a year. She was one
of Dematt's few women clients before they started this new
programme. She describes her husband's reaction:
"When I first started this business my husband did not
encourage me at all, in fact he tried to discourage me and
said I was wasting my time. But that did not stop me."
Meanwhile, several other women's business and finance
initiatives are also in the pipeline. Established women
entrepreneurs are in the process of forming their own
organisation.
Although an African Businessmen's Association already exists,
women can join but they cannot become executive members. A
Women's World Banking (WWB) group is being established in
Blantyre. WWB is an international organisation based in
Amsterdam that provides collateral so women can get bank
loans. It also offers them legal and financial advice.
The newly created Mudzi fund, modelled on the Grameen Bank of
Bangladesh, is going to offer credit to the poorest farmers -
80 percent of whom are women - and encourage them to
start small scale businesses.
Its pilot phase will begin in December initially with 2,000
farmers in Chiradzulu and Mangochi districts in the south.
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* Origin: AlterNet, Node1 (Opus 1:163/113)
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Patt Haring | United Nations | FAX: 212-787-1726
patth@sci.ccny.cuny.edu | Information | BBS: 201-795-0733
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