This is great initiative.
The key challenge to delivering development interventions, particularly to rural communities of developing countries, is the fact that the population lives in a scattered geography, where the infrastructure, particularly the road network and other communication facility is poor, making service delivery very costly. Indeed, much of the cost of education is in bringing sufficient numbers of people together with an educator at set times and places.
Now that the group lending methodology (started by Grameen Bank of Bangladesh, early 1980s, and adopted widely in many developing countries), as well as the Self-Help Group movements have managed to bring large number of local population together, who meet regularly (monthly and weekly). But women’s improved access to credit will have to be accompanied by a number of additional measures, such as non-formal education, skill up-grading, new agricultural technology and social and political consciousness-raising to challenge the patriarchal social structure.
Such regular community meetings provide convenient, cost effective platform to introducing such technology (often termed ‘’Credit with Education’’) to many people at the same time. In addition, participants not only learn on innovations from ‘’formal’’ sources (e.g agricultural extension) but also from fellow colleagues who already adopted such innovations. Indeed, the prospect of getting a loan can draw many people to a programme that offers them additional services.
But, if programmes aim at ensuring that rural women in patriarchal system use such technology, they also need to make sure that such women not only earn income, but also they ‘’control’’ such income. Indeed, while accessing micro-credit have been highly advocated for advancing innovative agricultural technologies, so little attention has been paid to the issues of women’s ability to control income. Women’s ability to control income, e.g through facilitating tailored saving services is an important source of promoting women’s empowerment and bargaining power (see attached paper).
Regards
Mr. Getaneh Gobezie