UN declaration of a "year of microfinancing" timely

A GNA Feature by B.A. Adom

Perhaps business start-ups are the way forward for breaking the vicious cycle of poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa and for that matter Ghana.

Research shows that women constitute the dominant labour force in the informal sector and about 70 per cent in the agric sector. Meanwhile, they have had to grapple with numerous economic challenges in their quest to make ends meet. It is for this reason that it is being speculated in many quarters that unless women were economically empowered they could not fulfil their socio-economic roles in society.

The voices of both men and women at the countryside indicate that Ghanaians must be realistic as a people since all was not well with despite the numerous interventions to provide access to micro-credit financing.

One serious issue that is agitating the minds of many well-meaning rural folks, especially women at the marketplace and farmers is the issue of ignorance. They have often argued as to whether they were ignorant or rather elite that was ignorant.

Indeed, despite the assumption that in the rural areas foodstuffs are less costly, a journey to our communities clearly shows that there is nothing like cheaper food in the villages.

Market women in the countryside are claiming that voluntary organisations, which go there to rescue them from their state of poverty, rather add to their problems.

They cited the situation where monies given to them to trade were not enough. For instance a bag of groundnut now sells for 800,000 cedis; a bag of beans, 1,000,000 cedis; and a bag of maize 600,000 yet they were given only 500,000 cedis.

They are, therefore, compelled to either go in to collect money from local money lenders to top up or buy in bits to sell and at the end of the day they are unable to pay back the loan.

This phenomenon has created a big problem for rural women whose main source of livelihood is farming and trading in foodstuffs.

They also claimed they are facing problems such as inadequate storage facilities, poor bargaining power, lack of fertilisers, poultry feed including their inability to meet quality standards due to the removal of subsidies on agricultural inputs.

This, therefore, makes the UN declaration of this year as a year of micro-financing timely and highly commendable because it has stood the test of time as many economies especially the EU have used it as a tool to fight poverty and unemployment by enabling people to establish their own small-scale enterprises.

This should be extended to Sub-Saharan Africa especially at the grassroots level where the majority of the populace are unemployed and the young ones keep on coming to the urban centres to look for non-existing jobs and end up indulging in social vices such as prostitution with its consequent contraction HIV/AIDS.

Indeed, business start-ups have proven positive in France where businesses established under these conditions grew to 67 per cent higher than other newly established ones.

In addressing this challenge at the grassroots level, therefore, it is important to include the private sector, the banking and non-banking institutions as well as the traditional authorities and the beneficiaries of these credit schemes to discuss how it would be granted and the basis of recovering so that others can also access it on time to make a decent living.

It is equally important to advise the beneficiaries to inculcate good savings habit so as to win the confidence of the lending agencies.