SOCIAL TOPICS (Archive): COMMUNITY

  I Was Lifted Up: A South African Testimonial

Published, Summer 2004

“I was lifted up!” With those four words, the waif of a woman in a flowered white cotton dress, blue plastic Chinese sandals, and hair in corn rows, stood tall, lifted up both hands, tilted her head and beamed.

We were in a Centre, a meeting of almost 50 other women micro-borrowers, in Molapo. This small town is in Limpopo Province, South Africa’s poorest, on the rich, intensely developing, hundred mile long platinum reef on the northern escarpment of the Great African Rift Valley. The scene of the meeting was a rust-brick, small, dark, cloth-ceilinged, corrugated roof church. The question one of us had asked the women toward the end of their meeting was, “In your life before your loan and after, how was the life you led then and how is your life now?”

“Before, I had nothing, I was nothing,” continued the woman. “Now,” she went on to explain, “my children can eat; I can pay their school fees and buy them their uniforms; and I can afford to pay fees for the Burial Society. I am something free. I have choices.” And with that, another hand went up, followed by the description of another changed life. And then several hands, more testimony, and then a cascade of hands. The moderator at that moment, John de Wit, founding director of the microbank, the Small Enterprise Foundation (SEF), had to intervene so that the meeting could end on time and an anxious mother could return to her children. The women’s enthusiastic responses were proof-personal that superbly managed microlending, targeted at those 50 percent below the South African poverty line, could reach deeply into the social fabric to touch those whose lives had had almost no hope, who were all but unreachable by government and charities.

SEF currently has more than 100 field workers—organizers, mostly of around university age, who attend to over 600 such Centres—and almost 22,000 borrowers. Loan amounts start as low as $15, though first loans average $90; with average loans of about $160; and none over $1,500. Molapo is one of 12 villages in the region that are the object of a study sponsored by physicians from the University of Witswatersrand carefully measuring the impact of microlending on the incidence of HIV/AIDS. Noriya Manganyi, the very capable and charismatic fieldworker at our Centre meeting, said she was attending one or two funerals a weekend at the invitation of families in the Centres for which she was responsible. The hypothesis of the study, so far supported by anecdotal evidence, is that there is a significant reduction in AIDS with microlending, for many reasons, perhaps in part because transactional sex is no longer necessary for survival in this booming mining region.

Each woman (and almost all borrowers are women, including older teenagers and grandmothers caring for families without parents, often lost to AIDS) belongs to a borrowers circle of four or five others, each of whom is an entrepreneur. Some are vendors of fruit or cell phone calls or curios; some are beauticians; some have opened a kiosk. They all attend every Centre meeting; nominate one spokesperson who reports on savings, borrowing, and repayments. Each must pay interest and a portion of principal at each meeting. Each must help the others of her circle succeed. Being late, failing to attend without reporting why, or failing to make payments brings a hefty finefive Rand, or about 75 cents. Each report, each payment, each achievement is met with applause. The Centre leader and the Centre treasurer handle all funds openly. Accounting records are maintained by the SEF field worker who never touches funds. The aggregation of the day’s monies is taken to a bank in town, a long bus ride away, by two borrowers who volunteer and are approved by the committee of the whole for the errand. Talk of the Centre’s business is confidential and does not leave the meeting at the church to protect the borrowers and especially the couriers, for crime is still a problem. The meetings are serious and polite, very disciplined, but very warm.

Toward the end of the meeting we attended, the chairperson pointed out that the guests, who sat to the right of the table at the head of the room, were late and, to more broad grins, each had to pay a five Rand fine. John de Wit covered for us, commenting that as driver he had been responsible for our tardiness. (Actually, our plane was late!) His payment was met with applause, laughter, and a little ululation. On that note, the woman in the white flowered dress rose, and began to sing, joined by her sister borrowers, a strong, joyous tone that pierced the heat, the dust, and our fatigue, a hymn of exuberance not unlike the South African national anthem Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika, “Lord, Bless Africa!”

—Stephen Moody

SEF (www.sef.co.za) is the most recent beneficiary of a guarantee arranged by the Thembani International Guarantee Fund (TIGF) and issued by Shared Interest (http://www.sharedinterest.org/), a community development finance institution (CDFI) supported significantly by clients as part of the CDFI program of Walden Asset Management. De Wit hopes SEF will quadruple in less than a decade should it receive sufficient funds. Shared Interest is one of three major nonprofit organizations derived from the Fund for a Free South Africa in 1992. Robert Zevin, who helped build our social investment program, was one of its founders and first chairs. Tim Smith, director of Socially Responsible Investing at Walden is also a founding Board member. Stephen Moody, the author of this vignette, was in a Shared Interest delegation, led by executive director Donna Katzin, which visited projects of TIGF and was a guest of President Thabo Mbeki at his second inauguration, April 27, 2004, the tenth anniversary of South Africa’s first democratic election.