Microfinance

Last year I volunteered on a microfinance project in Tanzania. I wanted to try and see for myself how it worked. There was six women’s groups. We would visit every women’s group once a week to see how they were doing, to collect their loan repayments and sometimes give them business training. Business training could be savings training, book keeping training, forecasting and planning training and so forth. Each women had a loan of 100,000, 200,000 or 300,000 Tanzanian shillings, they had a certain amount of weeks to pay the loan off without interest. For example with the 200,000 tsh loan they paid 12,500 tsh per week for 16 weeks. As this was a project build up by one supervisor and many interchanging volunteers it could sometimes be difficult to keep the momentum moving forward. But all of the women in the groups really seemed to have changed their lives for the better. Over the next month you will hear about the six different groups.