Empowering women through microcredit ensures benefit for all

Reuters Alert Net

Source: World Vision Middle East/Eastern Europe office (MEERO)

Global anti-poverty goals can be met 'only by investing in the world's women and girls,' stated UN Secretary General Bin Ki-moon during his recent message for International Women's Day 2008.

All over the world, the significant number of women entering into the workforce over the past three decades has produced profound transformations in the organisation of families, society, the economy, and urban life.

Most people living on less than one dollar a day are women. Helping women means fighting poverty and promoting gender equality. Microfinance could be the weapon of choice.

World Vision's Micro Finance Institutions (MFIs) worldwide primarily target women as clients.
Women often prove to be more financially responsible with better repayment performance than men.


Women have proven to be excellent clients - notably more of them pay back loans on time than their male counterparts - but they are also key drivers of development. Investing in women, literally, has proven the most effective way to increase individual family expenditures on health and education, improve nutrition and food security, protect against emergencies, and begin the slow process of tackling the gender inequalities that hinder development in so many countries around the world.

In World Vision's Middle East and Eastern Europe Region seven MFIs serve 50,100 female clients out of a total of 106, 000 clients, impacting children and the entire community. Internal research shows those female clients are more devoted to improving children's health, nutrition, and education than men.

During the last five years, the percentage of female clients has grown slowly but with great impact on children's lives, serving more than 44,000 children in Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Kosovo, and Serbia and Montenegro.

The MFI Agroinvest is serving a client base that is more than 60% female. Even if the percent of women clients is different country by country, all of them are joined with the same goal to give children life in all its fullness.


'Women have been the backbone of AgroInvest's client base since it started lending in 1999. Earlier research showed that women bore an equal or greater share of the work than men on family farms in Serbia and Montenegro. While husbands and sons often worked in non-farms business, their wives and daughters were found to be the de facto managers of income-generating activities on the farm. Research conducted by other organisations in countries around the world showed that women have higher repayment rates and to spend more of the profits on their children. We concluded, then, that from a business and a development perspective, focusing on women would be a wise thing to do. Since then, the percentage of women clients has fluctuated between 60% and 70% of our client base,' said Kyhl Amosson, World Vision National Director and CEO of VisionFund Agroinvest.

'Women are an important reason that AgroInvest has enjoyed one of the lowest delinquency rates among MFIs since we started in 1999, and why AgroInvest was rated #22 out of 641 MFIs by Forbes magazine in December 2007. Most importantly, they are an important reason why more children in Serbia and Montenegro have more 'life in all its fullness' than ever before," added Mr. Amosson.

All seven MFIs have enjoyed great success thanks to female clients. Yet they must do more bearing in mind 'progress for women is progress for all', and recognising that female clients may vary from country to country, but all the women share the same goal: giving their children life in all its fullness.