microfinance

Over 200 women and their families are benefiting from the WIBDI Micro-Finance scheme.

Women are given the opportunity to learn small business management and partake in a microfinance scheme that teaches them credit discipline and savings methods. In this way they become less reliant on remittances and learn responsible money management techniques.

Although common practice overseas, such savings and credit discipline is a novel concept in Samoa. Women in Business has taken on the challenge to introduce ethics which encourage regular work and savings habits. No mean feat in Samoa where all one’s basic needs are easily met by a stroll out of the house to the garden, the sea or the forest!

Under the strict yet gentle guidance of our small business trainers on their weekly visits, village women are able to set aside money to finance their work, village and children’s education from primary school through to university.

The women, who would be refused at the commercial banks even if they could somehow manage the often long, difficult and expensive journey to Apia, are also now even able to accommodate unforeseen circumstances.

Paua of the remote village of Tufutafoe on Savaii reinvested her savings in a cow which recently bore further fruit: two healthy female calves.