Kirua Good Hope Women's Cooperative
An
individual traveler approached Generosity in Action to assist her to aid
women in a small village near Arusha, Tanzania. The village where these
women live, Lasso Kirua, has about 800 residents, half of them children.
It is located on the slopes of Mt Kilimanjaro, about a 45 minute walk
from the nearest transportation and even farther to the next largest village
where this is a weekly market, a few stores and a medical clinic. Most
of the families are extremely poor, earning a dollar or two a week from
the small plots of land where they farm bananas, corn, coffee or garden
vegetables which they sell in the market. About a year ago, the women
organized themselves into the "Kirua Good Hope Women's Cooperative"
which now has a membership of about 27 women and their families and has
a leadership structure which includes the local school principal and several
long term women community leaders. They made up a list of things they
wanted to accomplish for their village.
One
of their chief goals-and something that is a struggle and a profound worry
for almost every family-is finding the $25 or so each year for school
uniforms and supplies required to send each child to school. The project
goals are to get knitting machines so the women can make their children's
school uniforms-thus increasing the likelihood that they will be able
to afford the cost of schooling their children. (In Africa, about 50%
of children don't attend school, mostly due to financial barriers.) The
group has divided themselves into teams of 6 women (each with a specific
workday) and come up with a detailed plan about how the women who know
how to use the equipment will train the others and how they will work
together to produce the simple sweaters, shirts and skirts or pants the
children are required to wear to school. They also have plans to sell
uniforms to other families in the village and nearby villages and to start
a custom seamstress service for the former villagers who return each year
for Christmas and like to have traditional clothing made for themselves.
Mama
Flora, shown on the right with her daugfhter Lily, is the president of
the Kirua Good Hope Women's Cooperative. Our dealings are directly with
her and her organizing committee.
The
women also asked if they could start a microloan project with the funds
that was presented to them in November '06. Individuals or groups of women
are able to borrow money to do a mini-business and repay it with a bit
of interest from the profits they make.
Ten projects are underway with the first donation. The projects include raising pigs and poultry, buying bulk quantities of grain and repackaging it for sale in smaller quantities in the village.
The women have set up their own rules, approved all the projects and
developed a bookkeeping mechanism for keeping track of the loans. As well
as providing a small amount of capital, they also were very happy to have
opportunity to design their own project and make decisions about how to
spend the money themselves.
The seed money for these projects will be fairly limited but, as one of the women told us, the money is important but so is the energy and encouragement they get from knowing that other people are interested and believe in what they are doing.
This program ia a part of a greater Tanzania
Zanzibar International Volunteer Association (TZVIA)
program. . For more information you may contact info@GenerosityInAction.org.
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