SUNS4504 Tuesday 7 September 1999

Development: Microcredit reaches more poor women

United Nations, Sep 3 (IPS/Farhan Haq) -- Poor women today were gaining greater access to savings and credit mechanisms worldwide, according to a survey of more than 900 microcredit organisations that serve 22 million clients.

The 925 programmes reporting to the survey, conducted by the Washington-based Microcredit Summit Campaign, said that more than 12.5 million of their clients came from groups that qualified among the countries' poorest.

Further, 74 percent of the poorest clients of the 40 largest microcredit programmes involved in the survey were women.

The number of clients among the poorest groups in 1999 represented a sharp increase in the past year, according to the Microcredit Summit Campaign. In its survey last year, the number of poorest clients reached was only 8.1 million.

At the release of the Campaign's 1999 survey at the United Nations Friday, officials praised the growth of microcredit programmes specifically targeted at poor women.

"Our goal should always be to improve the economic assets of women as a means of enhancing their socioeconomic position," said Noeleen Heyzer, executive director of the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM).

"We have learned that when women gain economic autonomy, the health, nutrition and education of other members of the household, especially children, improve at the same time," Heyzer said.

"Women are more dependable in repaying their loans and put more of the proceeds from their enterprises toward the well-being of their children," Campaign Director Sam Daley-Harris added. "If you are committed to the eradication of poverty, then your focus will be on women."

The Campaign stressed that the 12.5 million poorest clients in the survey did not account for all those currently being served by microcredit programmes. There are some 600 institutions involved in the Microcredit Summit Council which did not report in to the Campaign's secretariat for the current survey.

Yet many of the organisations that contributed to the survey have shown a high level of interest in providing loans to women in the poorest groups of their societies.
Bangladesh's Grameen Bank, one of the microcredit pioneers, claimed to serve 2.4 million borrowers among the poorest groups, of which 2.28 million, or 95 percent, were women.

Similarly, 90 percent of the Country Women's Association of Nigeria's 126,000 poorest borrowers were women, while 65 percent of the Caribbean Confederation of Credit Union's 400,000 poorest clients were women.

At a time when, according to the Campaign, two-thirds of the 1.5 billion people worldwide who live on less than one dollar a day were women, such results go a long way toward accomplishing the aims of the February 1997 Microcredit Summit.

During that meeting, held in Washington, 2,900 people representing 1,500 institutions around the world agreed to set a goal to provide 100 million families - with a particular emphasis on women - with credit by 2005.

Some surveys, however, have indicated that simply providing credit to poor women may not be enough to allow them to control their lives - particularly if the men in their families try to take charge of the loans.

A 1996 study of four Bangladeshi microcredit programmes, printed in 'World Development' magazine, found that 39 percent of the women respondents who received loans from those programmes said they had little or no control of those loans.

Helen Todd, editor of CASHPOR - a network which has tried to replicate the experience of Grameen Bank - said that when she studied 40 long-term women borrowers who relied on Grameen Bank, 10 of them said they had little or no control over their loans.

"They were just taking the money and pipelining it to a husband, a son, a father-in-law, or some other male within the household - sometimes a male outside the household, which was an even more exploitative situation," Todd told the Campaign.

She argued that, to avoid such a misuse of microcredit, business should be conducted openly in villages to mitigate the chances for corruption.

Also, she said, banks should encourage women's empowerment by "having simple structures that they can operate and understand - like the group and centre structure in the Grameen Bank."