22nd June 2011, Children Education through women empowerment is shortlisted as a finalist at Cameroon Development Marketplace.
14th and 15th July are the dates for Fair of Ideas, where the finalist had a chance to demonstrate the potential of their projects to the Jury.
260 organisations submitted their entries for this competition, and 50 projects were shortlisted as finalist. Final decision on 15 winners will be based on the presentation to an esteemed jury comprising officials from World Bank and CRS.
Following is the summary and presentation of this project.
“Children education through women empowerment” by Goodness and Mercy Mission is a self sustainable project where business model of Palm trading is combined with saving and lending concept to enable women gather money for their children’s education at the same time helping them with a continuous monthly income and a monthly access to cheap loan from their own pooled saving.
Sustainability is the key to this project and Income, saving and reinvestment are the 3 Pillars of success for this program, income earned is saved and reinvested and that is how the whole model will work and sustain.
The need: “Early childhood care and education can create the foundations for life of expanded opportunities. Yet, According to UNESCO’s EFA, Global Monitoring report for 2011, in Sub Saharan Africa out of every 100 children within the official age-group for primary education, only 14 are enrolled in school. Many of whom enter school with learning impairments stemming from malnutrition, ill health, poverty and lack of pre primary education. Researches by UNESCO have proved that most pronounced barrier to childhood development program is household poverty. Progress towards education can never be achieved if criticality of women’s role in children education and health is not understood and their ability to reduce household poverty is not addressed.” Thus empowering women with financial stability and decision making ability can facilitate education to end generational cycles of poverty and disease and provides a foundation for sustainable development.
How will it work: The grant money will cover cost for first 5 months only after which it will be self financed and will sustain for its life time. Women will have a steady flow of monthly income, a disciplined saving every month which they will pool together and this pool will be available to them as a cheap and hassle free short term loan. Margin earned on selling the oil and Interest earned on the savings will help grow the capital asset. Thus at the end of the 1st year they will be able to gather a sum big enough to meet their children’s education cost. As there will be many children in the community that may not be directly benefit from this project thus to help other needy children, GMM will use a Part of Grant Money to manage a small library at the ICT room in GMM office where needy children can come and borrow the books. Women benefitting from this project will be encouraged to share the Educational equipments like Books, Stationeries and old uniforms with other needy children in the community through this library. At the end of academic year they can either donate or lend these items to GMM library.
Selection of women by involving Community and PTA: As this project is aimed at helping needy children have access to education and assisting their mother’s who are the primary caregiver to be financially self dependent, GMM will involve community and PTA to identify needy children who are unable to pay their fees or have other school needs and will work with the women attached to them. The PTA will help GMM in the identification and the key people in communities like the village heads, priests, leaders, women groups we are working with will help GMM to identify the cases in the community to deal with. It is through them that we shall know whom we are dealing with.
As per the projection, at the beginning of 13th month Each women group will have an accumulated saving and lending kitty of approx. 1200 US, which will be redistributed to the members according to the saving contribution made which they can use to finance their children education for an year. There will be surplus of more 250 USD at SHG level which will be carry forwarded as retained earnings and will be used to buy Palm Oil for the coming month.
A power point presentation on this project is available at http://www.scribd.com/doc/80758232/Children-Education-through-women-empowerment-for-Cameroon-Development-Marketplace-Competition
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