Women as Engines Out of Poverty

Robin Wright

Micro-Credit Praised

The venture is now being replicated worldwide, usually, but not exclusively for women and both in towns and in the country-side. "Microcredit programs have brought the vibrancy of the market economy to the poorest villages and people. This business approach has allowed millions to work their way out of poverty with dignity," said World Bank President James D. Wolfensohn.

Little Ioans for women are now having the biggest impact in alleviating poverty worldwide. Hoang, for example, paid for the first year of fish fingerlings with the help from a micro-credit loan facilitated by the UN. Development Program. "The key to ending poverty is making use of all things in your life, not just importing new equipment", said Margaret Carpenter, an assistant AID administrator. "Women are often that key, because they can take skills they have or can easily be taught and turn them into extra cash. And that process is begun by offering microcredit to get started using those skills."

In the Philippines, microcredit helped Teresita Mercado convert rags into squatter riches. In her shanty of raw concrete blocks, the stout 52-year-old grandmother with a graying ponytail stitches garment-industry remnants into pads for car washes and shoe covers for factories.

Although she works at home, Mercado is no longer alone."Micro-entrepreneurs" are moving into a new stage as they form networks, or nascent unions.

In 1993, Save the Children began an experiment in mobilizing some of the 25,000 women in Manila's rag industry. The goal is to help independents negotiate cheaper textile prices, transport costs and marketing outlets and to provide a mechanism to sustain their projects once aid sources move on.

Mercado's net income was $32 a month when she started seven years ago, buying cloth bits and selling products on the street. After she joined a bloc of 1,600 rag workers, her profits rose to $240 monthly, enough to put two of her five children through vocational school. One is now an X-ray technician in Saudi Arabia; the other is a pharmacist's assistant.

Now Mercado is treasurer of the rag group within Women's Microenterprise Network, the program spawned by Save the Children. She also now makes more than her husband, Alfredo, a chauffeur in Saudi Arabia for a decade. "I've just asked him to come home," she said. "Our group can now afford to pay him as a driver to distribute our products." Here too the social order has begun to shift. "I have the power to bargain and suggest in business and in my family," Mercado added. "In Filipino culture, the husband is traditionally on top and the wife must follow. But soon I'm going to be his boss."
Aid experts fully acknowledge a reverse gender bias.