Women, urged President Arroyo, should avail themselves of the government’s micro-financing programs for stimulating entrepreneurship.
The President made the pitch during the March 7 Palace ceremony marking International Women’s Day.
The newly launched programs support science and technology and entrepreneurship: Harnessing Appropriate Technology to Assist Women (Hataw) and Projects for Women Entrepreneurs (Power).
Household queens
Women hold up more than half the sky in many Filipino households. In many single-income families like the Apas of Mandaue, the wife does not just raise the children and keep house but also supplements the income of her spouse.
In the ‘70s, Nene Apa sold food and iced water from a street stand outside the elementary school of Tipolo. Her daily earnings were plowed back into her street vending and a “rainy day” savings fund; husband Marino’s earnings as a driver for a private company sustained the needs of the family, primarily the schooling of their four children.
By dint of thrift, savings and hard work, Nene and Marino branched out into selling water to their neighbors. By the ‘80s, they were distributing softdrinks and beer to clients in Cebu and Mandaue. Handling the distributorship themselves enabled them to avoid the common pitfalls and risks of this venture. Today, despite the slump in sales volume due to the decline in softdrinks consumption, the business provides a more than comfortable standard of living for the Apas, including their grandchildren.
Root of good and evil
Not all micro-entrepreneurs bridge the chasm between vision and reality successfully.
Access to financial capital, specially for women in low-income families, is a formidable barrier. But development experience for decades also backs up the wisdom that access to credit is just one difficulty.
Capability in meeting credit obligations is an even more critical factor for not just rescuing families from poverty but preventing them from being mired more heavily in the debt trap.
Increase in income does not also immediately translate into an improvement of living standards. Values have to be reoriented away from meeting immediate gratification (i.e. increased consumerism, luxuries, vices) to sustaining long-term investments in education for one’s children, increased spending for nutrition and health, and capital for entrepreneurship and income generation.
Two roads
There are two approaches in nurturing a culture of entrepreneurship among the economically and socially disadvantaged.
The system of “solidarity lending” was initiated by the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. In 2006, the Grameen Bank and its founder, Muhammad Yunus, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for starting the self-help group system, now being followed and adopted in more than 43 countries.
Each five-member group encourages all members to repay their loans and save for contingencies. In Bangladesh, 97 percent of Grameen members are women. More than half of the nearly 50 million borrowers in Bangladesh have risen out of acute poverty due to their small loans.
Grameen measures poverty alleviation by these standards: all children of school age are in school; all household members eat three meals a day; a sanitary toilet; rainproof roof; clean drinking water; and ability to repay weekly their Grameen loan.
Offering an alternative to Grameen’s group approach is the Association for Social Advancement (ASA), a nongovernment organization (NGO) extending microcredit to Bangladeshi women.
According to “Beyond the Seed Money,” written by Marivir Montebon and published by the Ramon Aboitiz Foundation Inc. (Rafi), the ASA model focuses on individual accountability, women-centered recruitment, decentralized and rural-based operations and other strategies to achieve a high repayment rate of loans.
According to the Rafi documentation, merging individual and communal strategies has been successful for supporting micro-entrepreneurship. This may be gleaned from the track records of local NGOs like the Cebu Court of First Instance Cooperative, the Visayas Cooperative Development Center and the Cebu Micro Enterprise Development Foundation Inc.
Behind entrepreneurs are social reformers that are as “bold, innovative and inventive” in closing the chasm between vision and reality.
