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.
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