I visited South Africa last October at the invitation of the government and the United Nations Development Program. I met Ben Nkuma, who was the Small Enterprise Foundation (SEF) representative at an international roundtable on microcredit in Pretoria. From the moment I met him I knew Ben was an extraordinary indiviual. He is the founder and director of Tshomisano (which roughly means “working together”), SEF’s Grameen-like program for the poorest.   Meeting Ben was a wonderful surprise. This is the story of an African, a real son of the soil, a social entrepreneur, a poor boy who grew up with the determination to change the world so that no one else would endure the same.

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Ben explained to me, “Our method of finding the poor is called Participatory Wealth Ranking. We ask the village to come together, draw a map of their village section and identify the people living in each household and then rank them according to categories of poverty. Different reference groups do the ranking. Mostly there is consistent agreement among at the groups as to who is poor, less poor, middle, rich and very rich.”

Ben’s voice then trembled a bit and his tone lowered as he said. “Poor in South African terms means those people who are barely surviving. They struggle to have meals, no one in the house is employed, the housing is poor, their children cannot attend school.
 

I quickly learned that SEF is different from its new experimental program. I asked Ben why he created Tshomisano. He said “When I joined SEF, I worked for the SEF micro-credit project as a branch manager. What worried me was that our mission emphasized the fact that we must help the very poor to overcome poverty. But we did not really reach the very poor. An evaluation in 1995 showed that only 30 to 40% of SEF’s clients were very poor. I told everyone we should make an effort to reach our target group and was supported by (SEF Managing Director) John de Wit. Transforming SEF’s microcredit project would have been very diffcult, so it was suggested that I become in charge of designing a project for the very poor. So we started Tshomisano Credit Project (TCP) in 1995.”

Ben and a colleague went to Bangladesh in March 1997 for about 3 weeks. He said, “It was a very interesting experience. To me, understanding poverty in a global perspective was one thing I wanted to experience in my life. When we started TCP we knew about Grameen. But all the information we used to design Tshomisano was from the reading material we had. Getting to see it first hand changed a lot in our thinking and methodology. I should mention I knew we wanted to alleviate poverty through a Grameen type of approach, but there were lots questions we did not have answers for. Being in Bangladesh, we had the opportunity to question everything”.

SEF has received quite a bit of publicity outside the country, but within South Africa it is hardly known. In spite of the robust civil society, very few organizations are working with the poorest. Ben tried to explain this anomaly to me. “I think it is because there was a lot of conceptualization taking place outside South Africa about poverty and micro-credit for the very poor. SEF has been mostly funded by outside donors and so is better known to the funders and people in their countries and other organizations funded by the same donors as SEF.”

I asked Ben what were the biggest problems he now faced and his most important successes so far. His answer again reveals his commitment to making multiple changes in the lives of real people, not just getting loans out and repaid. “Working with the most vulnerable is a problem itself. They do not want to join the program until you do intensive motivation. When they join, they are easily affected by disasters that subject them to circumstances that are diffcult for our staff to handle.”

“However,” Ben explained, “we established an ongoing impact assessment which is done by the field staff and we realized we are having a lot of success. For example, many members are able to successfully run businesses, they are increasing heir household incomes, there is increased interaction of the very poor with other people in their communities, and members are being able to assist one another in solving problems. These successes are again verified by the fact that many members do not leave TCP after repaying their loans, our 100% repayment rate, members building proper houses, and so on.” Ben looked at me with an intense stare trying to read my face. He wanted to make certain that I understand the full import of his message. He added, “Fighting poverty is not child’s play. It is a war. Poverty is perhaps humankind’s worst enemy.”