An effective mechanism for combating poverty
Editorial
ALMOST a decade ago, the Women's Affairs Bureau, with the assistance of a United Nations agency launched an initiative for helping poor women to transform their economic existence. A group of urban and rural women was selected for a training course in food preservation. It was a short, live-in course conducted at the Mon Repos School of Agriculture and the women were taught the rudiments of preserving meats, vegetables and fruits. At the end of the exercise, the women were required to attend sessions in Small Business Techniques, after which they were offered loans to launch their own projects. Personnel of the Women's Affairs Bureau and the United Nations offices here must have been extremely gratified at the good fortune of the scheme, for at an exhibition to celebrate International Women's Day in March, 1991, the success stories were legion. One woman, who was displaying stewed gooseberries in small packets, explained wonderingly how for years she had just watched the ripe gooseberries litter her East Coast village yard. Now, she said, with the assistance of her children and grandchildren, she was earning good income processing and selling the fruit. Another housewife, who had chosen the pickled meats venture, disclosed that she had been deluged with so many orders from hinterland miners that she had to work out an arrangement with another meat producer in order to fulfil her quotas! Indeed, helping more people with the means to launch small or micro enterprises must be described as one of the most effective mechanisms in the fight against poverty. The phenomenal Grameen Bank model, which has been successfully replicated in many Third World countries, was even adopted to help small entrepreneurs in industrialised nations. In essence, the Grameen theory offers loans to small groups of persons with the members cross-guaranteeing one another. The notion is that as the groups repay loans and prove their creditworthiness, they then engage higher loans to further develop their ventures. In the mid-1990s, one of the windows of the World Bank allocated funds specifically for financing micro-enterprises. The loan sum available to each person was just US$100, yet, in the words of the Bank, those tiny loans proved to be so effective that the borrowers were deemed "multipliers of prosperity". The World Bank holds the view that the distribution of income in an economy remains an important determinant of the way in which growth affects poverty reduction. Some of the statistics of poverty are very disturbing: More than one-fifth of the world's population, thousands of whom go to bed hungry, live on less than US$1 a day; approximately 90 per cent of the planet's poor in the developing world are located in South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Indo-China, Mongolia, Central America, Brazil and some provinces of China. In South Asia, which accounts for 39 per cent of the world's poor, one in every 12 children born is expected to die before the age of nine. The economic stringencies forcing governments to cut back on the state's workforce is compounded by the gospel of globalisation with its penchant for downsizing employees while maximising production and profits. Job openings, therefore, in both the public and private sectors are becoming more scarce with every passing year. That is why more people will seek credit for micro enterprises as a creative mechanism for, not only survival, but also for transforming their lives and making them multipliers of prosperity. 
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