Friday, March 16, 2012

A Day At DIRA

We have finally finished our out of town SACCOS visits.  Today we went to the diocese office (the Diocese of Iringa Area or DIRA) to meet with their fledgling SACCOS.  When we got to DIRA we found that Itiweni had been delayed in town at the bank.  We took the opportunity to go over to the DIRA kindergarten to see the kids.  The children are wonderful to see.  They are always happy to have visitors and smiling warmly.  They sang the Tanzanian national anthem for us.  We always love to hear children sing that song.  After Tom gave them all candy and videotaped them singing, we said “Asante sana” to the teacher, and then left for our meeting.

The meeting was held in the chapel area of the complex.  There were 11 men and 16 women at the meeting.  Before the meeting started we had a chance to visit with two of the leaders.  We asked them why they needed a SACCOS when they are right in town and all have “regular” jobs with salaries.  They laughed a bit and told us that given the nature of their salaries at DIRA they all needed to have an income on the side to support their families.  

When we asked what they did for additional income, about 85% of them said they had small farms and the others told us they had some type of shop.  So why not join one of the other SACCOS in town?  The answer was the same as we have been hearing – there were only two that they were eligible to join – a government one and a private one.  The government SACCOS had lots of bad loans so people lost money all of the time.  The private one took savings but only gave loans to their friends and family.  The other micro finance offices in town only gave loans for 1, 2, or 3 months at a time and so they would not work for farming.

When Itiweni arrived the meeting got underway.  Chavalla, the general secretary, welcomed everyone to the meeting.  He made it clear that he did NOT run this SACCOS and was only a member.  He said that in our honor the meeting would be conducted in English (all of the DIRA personnel speak at least some English).  We thanked him and Tom started talking.

Tom told them about Iringa Hope, the Micro Finance Institute, and the newly formed Joint SACCOS.  He discussed what a SACCOS is for (income projects only), how to fund it (save first, then borrow), and how to keep it honest and fair (full disclosure all of the time).  Sandy then got up to speak.  She noted that there were no women in the leadership of the SACCOS and told them they needed to change this (they decided to replace the secretary with a woman).  She talked a bit about the importance of women in getting a SACCOS to run well and then turned the meeting over to Itiweni.

Itiweni could see that some of the members did not really understand the English so she asked Chavalla if it was OK to switch to Swahili.  She got the OK and then spent about 45 minutes reviewing the operations of a SACCOS.  They have had a constitution, officers, and savings for awhile now, but they were uncertain about how to extend this to loans.  So far they had saved about $600 and wanted to know if it was time to start giving loans.  We told them that they should come to our training seminar (they will) next week and that we could then help them set up their loan committee.  (They have received a generous gift from America to help them get started, so they will have enough to start with loans this planting season.)

After we left the meeting we went to collect the books for next week’s meeting.  Surprise – they had not gotten them!  So, after making arrangements to have them shipped in by Monday we went to Tumaini for some meetings.  The rest of the day we spent in making arrangements for the upcoming training session.


We got to the DIRA compound.


We visited the DIRA kindergarten.

Then back to the chapel area for a meeting.

There were 11 men and 16 women at the meeting.

We went back to Tumaini for more meetings.

We went in to visit with Provost Bangu - we had not seen him yet!



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