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Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - Group Enterprise

By Philippe Lamoise

At the training on Tuesday, I wanted to emphasize something that Chuck had covered in a previous training. He told the community that each one of them would be better off by specializing in one specific area that they do best. So I geared today's session towards giving specific examples on how to process. I explained that currently we had 5 farmers (Alfred, Bob, Charles, David, and Eric) each growing 2 acres of maize, cassava, potatoes, ground nuts, having 5 chicken, 1 cow, etc. Just enough to feed their families and survive. So they would need very little money to buy other things, but they would also never improve their situation. Instead of each doing the same thing, my example showed that Alfred could specialize in growing maize, Bob would grow cassava, Charles would raise Chicken, etc. And instead of growing 5 times 2 acres of maize, Alfred would be able to grow 20 acres. The production from the first 10 acres would be equivalent to what the 5 of them would have grown on their own, and would be enough to feed their families. The remainig corn could be sold to generate some money to bring them out of poverty.

I explained that the newly generated income, could be used in 3 ways: investment to grow their business, savings to have some safety if anything goes wrong one year, and personal use to improve their living conditions. We explained the concept of investment was only working if the increase in revenue is higher than the amount you spent on the investment. That a real simple concept for us in the United States, but it is not obvious for them in the local community, since they would very often start something without any planning or calculations of how much they would get as revenue, compared to how much they spent. So after my section of the training, chuck continued in the same direction and explained the basics of enterprise budgets.

Thursday, January 6, 2011 - Microcredit

While we were at the Handicapped Rotary Community Corps in the late morning (page 18) some Rotarians from Kampala North arrived, including the current President, Oskar Semweya-Musoke, and the President-Elect, Godfrey Jjooga Ssebukulu. They also brought Kenneth Barigye from the Salama Shield foundation, specializing in Microcredit. In the photo on the left, from left to right: Godfrey, Patrick, Chuck, Lynn, Philippe, Oskar, Shelly, Annslie, Kenneth, and Stephen.

So the afternoon training session was spent to explain the basics of microcredit. The community would have to get organized in groups of 5 people (reinforcing the group enterprise training of Tuesday) to apply for some small loans with a repayment guarantee from the other people in the group. After the first loan is paid back successfully, the people in the group would be able to go through another loan cycle with higher loan amounts. Many of these farmers do not have any colateral to guarantee a loan when they apply for it at a commercial bank, so this microcredit concept gives them access to small amounts of money, while allowing them to build a reliable "credit history" so that they would not be turned down later when applying for a loan at a commercial bank.

A lot of these microcredit projects are happening throughout the world, and are very successful loaning to women only. But the Kampala North Rotary Club, and the local community decided that we would do this project with both men and women. We wrote on the blackboard the reasons women were more reliable. I told them that we were taking a risk by including the men, so the men would have to make sure they are honest, hard-working, committed, etc.