Visit to the South #2 – Gender Awareness Training and a Lesson on Equity

This was the second in a series of three Gender Awareness Training workshops that we are doing to sensitize SACCO representatives on gender issues and mainstreaming gender into their programs and policies. There were about 34 participants, and many more women attended this time, which was great to see.

In Malawi, women don’t have equal access to financial services. There are many reasons for this – a lack of education, lack of decision making power within the household and high levels of poverty among women, just to name a few. The thing is, when it comes to micro-credit, women in general have far better repayment rates. They rarely default on their loans, and pay back the money easily and in good time. In general (and this is broadly speaking) men are much worse at paying back loans, and tend to use money for themselves, rather than for the family. If women are a better risk financially, why then, are most of the loans going to men? It is all an issue of access – access to education about financial services and access to the power and knowledge to go to the SACCO and get a loan. Men tend to be the ones who are in charge of bringing money into the household, and therefore it is more often than not the man in the family who has access to financial services and not the woman. Ironically, however, women do about 2/3 of the world's work, and produce about 75 - 90% of the food crops in the world. And this is just productive work - it doesn't even include the reproductive or community work that women bear the load of. FINCOOP, one of the SACCOs we are working with, is actually in the process of designing a loan specifically for women. This will encourage women to access credit and will be combined with the education they need to ensure that the money is used to its fullest extent. Increasing female membership of the SACCOs is not only working towards empowering women and increasing the quality of their lives, but it is just good business sense!

So, you might ask – if we are talking about gender equality, and there are loans specifically for women, isn’t that discrimination against men? There is a difference between gender EQUALITY and gender EQUITY. Equity is a stage in the process of attaining gender equality, and requires the fair and just distribution of resources to achieve the end goal of equality. It is all about leveling the playing field. Even if in theory men and women have equal access to credit at the SACCOs, practically, this might not be the case for the reason that described above. In this case, the SACCO services need to be made more easily available to women, so that they can have the same end result as the men.

It is like the story of the Fox and the Crane –

“The Fox invited the crane to dinner and prepared his special soup. He thoughtlessly served the soup in his favourite shallow bowl and the crane had difficulty eating because only the tip of her long beak could reach the soup. The next day, the Crane invited the fox to dinner and served soup in her tall, slender bowl from which the fox had great difficulty eating”.

Both had an equal chance to eat the soup, but in both cases, one was left out. In order to be fair an equitable, they need different chances – a shallow bowl and a tall, slender bowl – in order to achieve an equal result. Seems like Aesop had it right. What a smart guy.

All in all, the training went well and I think we have achieved our goal of sensitization. We just need to make people aware of the issues so they can start thinking about the importance of mainstreaming gender within their SACCOs.

I think that is enough of a lesson today. Thanks for humouring me...

Visit to the South #1 - Study Circles

I’ve just returned from a trip down to Blantyre and the south of Malawi. I travelled with Innocent and Violet and our goal was to spend a few days meeting Study Circles, checking up on the implementation of Bvumbwe and Thyolo SACCOs AIDS and Gender policies and facilitating another Gender Awareness Workshop like we held in Mzuzu. I love any chance to get out of Lilongwe and see another new part of the country. I’ve been doing pretty well in the last few weeks, and it’s been great! I was also at the Lake for the first time last weekend, as we had a work retreat/meeting in Senga Bay. The lake was nice and warm, and it’s as big as the Great Lakes, so you can’t see across to the other side. The Southern region of Malawi seems to be much more mountainous than the Central region where Lilongwe is. The landscape around Dedza in particular is quite spectacular. South of Dedza, the road is the border between Malawi and Mozambique and there is one part where you drive up a mountain road – one with nothing but a drop on the other side, and the view out an across into Mozambique is amazing. It kind of makes you remember how arbitrary all these borders are anyway. When the road is the border between two countries, but a market spans both sides of the road, you know it doesn’t mean much.

We spent the first 2 days in the field visiting 5 Study Circles in Thyolo District (pronounced ‘Cholo’) near Bvumbwe. I think this is by far the most ‘off the beaten path’ I’ve been in Malawi – After we turned off the main road at Bvumbwe, we drove for at least another 40 minutes out through the tea plantations and hills to get to the first Study Circle site, and each one after that was progressively further away. It’s beautiful out here. The rolling hills are dotted with huts, and seems more lush, although that’s not saying much because it is the dry season and everything is parched. South of Bvumbwe, the whole landscape is covered with tea plantations – very colonial looking with little white farm houses and Jacaranda trees. I’m not sure that I like the politics behind it, but it is beautiful...

I always like going out in to the field. Its so different from the day to day work at the office, and I hardly feel like it is work at all. I’m actually being paid to do this, which is pretty amazing considering that I would pay them, if I had to. Even though I really enjoy it, it is not without its frustrations. My main frustration is the language barrier. I don’t speak Chichewa and the people out here don’t speak English. The little Chichewa that I have managed to pick up doesn’t help at all when trying to follow full conversations and everyone speaks so quickly that I have no hope. I know that translating is a bit of a pain for my coworkers, so I just hope that they tell me the gist of what is happening and then I just smile and look pretty the rest of the time.

The Study Circle program is a great example of grassroots development. Groups of 7 – 15 people from a SACCO will get together and discuss the issues that they have in their community, and come up with their own solutions on how to solve them in a democratic and collaborative way. MUSCCO provides training for the Study Circle facilitators as well as information booklets on a number of different topics such as AIDS, farming, credit management and gender. There are thousands of Study Circles in Malawi, so it is obviously a really beneficial program. Some of the groups we visited had project keeping chickens, pigs and bees, and planting Macadamia nut trees, however I was most impressed by the Study Circle we visited on the second day. Not only did they have a thriving community garden, but they had a home-based orphan care program and had built a nursery school where they held a feeding program for the orphans and elderly in the community. It was really amazing to see the good work that this group has done. There are challenges, yes, but there are successes as well. We should never forget that people here have an amazing capacity.

While we were sitting listening to one of the Study Circle meetings, some children were walking down the road on the way home from school came and sat with us. I think the kids here are super shy - not sure if its because of the city folk, or the white girl, but none of them really came up to me. They all seemed to take a very curious, but distanced, position and sat around Violet, although their eyes seemed fixed on me! Primary school is free in Malawi, and even though you are supposed to have a uniform, apparently it is not really enforced, which is good. There is no logical reason to me why a child should not get an education just because he or she doesn’t have the right clothes. I was also pleased to see that there is feeding program at the school a well. I don’t think this farming area is as successful as Mitundu, so it is good to see that the children are at least getting one full meal a day.

Much more than the other groups, the fourth group we visited seemed to be quite taken by the fact that a white girl was in the village. It is interesting to be such a novelty. I had to laugh, when at the end of the meeting, as we were walking out to the get the truck, some of the women started playing with my hair! It’s much different from theirs in colour and texture so they got quite a kick out of it I think. Haha. I was reminded of that scene in ‘Seven Years in Tibet’ when the little Dalai Lama ruffles Brad Pitt’s hair and says “yellow hair! yellow hair!”. We had a moment . I love when this happens with the women – we don’t really know what the other is saying, but the shared laugh and smile is there, and that leads to some kind of mutual understanding. The common bond of sisterhood spans all countries and cultures.

Stay tuned for Gender Awareness Training workshops! Coming soon....

Village Visits

Mitundu is only an hour from Lilongwe, but it is worlds away. To get there you drive on progressively smaller and bumpier roads, past fields of maize and cassava, past small mud brick homes and village water pumps. Because the villagers we were visiting are members of FINCOOP, they are able to save money and access credit, and although they are poor, they have enough to eat – they have food, clothing and shelter, but not a lot more. We pulled up to the village in our white MUSCCO truck, and were greeted by women singing and dancing. As Violet and I joined in, I thought to myself: “This is it”. This is it! I finally figured out what I want to do with my life, I went back to IPMP for a year to learn how to do it, and now I’m in Africa, wearing a chitenje, dancing with women in a village and talking to people about Gender and AIDS. This is what I want to do. This moment has been the highlight of Malawi thus far.

We drove out to Mitundu to talk to the Mtawa Farmer’s club about the issues and challenges of HIV/AIDS and Gender. The farmer’s club is a member of FINCOOP, one of the SACCOs that Violet and I are helping to develop policies on HIV/AIDS and Gender. We have been doing interviews with the FINCOOP Board of Directors, Management and Staff, and now we are in the process of talking to the members – the owners, if you will – to see what they feel are the challenges of HIV/AIDS and Gender and what FINCOOP can put in a policy that will help them.

I shook everyone’s hand and said “muli bwanji” to everyone and just loved the fact that I was there at that moment. We sat in chairs and benches in a rough circle in the centre of the houses, with women on one side and men on the other. Violet, Moses, Innocent and I sat at the ‘head’ of the circle and Innocent lead the discussion, while Violet and I took notes and listened, and Moses translated for me. I really like the approach we took – because FINCOOP is a Co-operative, the members are the owners and therefore we came to ask our bosses their views on HIV/AIDS and Gender. What do they feel are the issues, what are their challenges and what can we learn from them. I was wondering how we might be received, driving in in a big, white, truck – city folk who have come to teach the villagers. But it wasn’t like that at all. We were so well received, and everyone was really receptive and interested in what we wanted to talk about. There were about twice as many men as women involved in the discussion, and although we specifically encouraged the women to speak their views, they weren’t quite as vocal as the men. That being said, if a heated debate got going, they were in there just as much as anyone!

We began by asking what people already knew about HIV/AIDS and Gender. I was really impressed and people really seemed to know a lot, although there were some obvious misconceptions. Our meeting kind of turned into a bit of an education session on these topics as well, which I think was great.

An interesting point that came up and the lively debate that followed centred on the issue of chiwerewere and chigololo. Chiwerewere is having pre-martial sex with a number of different partners, and chigololo is having an extra-marital affair. Some people seemed to think that you could get HIV from chiwerewere but not from chigololo. Interesting. There are clearly some misconceptions and a lack of understanding from a biomedical science angle, but interesting nonetheless. People were however quite educated on ways that HIV was transmitted other than that. It’s good to see that this is nothing they haven’t heard before.

On the topic of Gender, people were also very knowledgeable about the fact that women can do men’s work and men can do women’s work, and that everyone is equal, but there seems to be a stalling point in the fact that men would never actually do women’s work and vice versa. People say it is an issue of culture. This is true, and it is also true that culture is dynamic and can change. We cannot change our biological roles, but we can change our cultural roles. It is a slow process, and one that has to be done on one’s own terms, but it can be done. I have a lot of thoughts going on in my head about behaviour change and culture change, but I think I’ll save that for another educational post.

We also went to visit a couple other co-operative groups as well - the Gulliver Women’s Club in Lilongwe and the Tasintha Co-operative Society out in a village called Namitete. Unfortunately the meeting with Gulliver was quite small, as we had our timing off and many of the women were at work, but the meeting with Tasintha was equally as interesting as Mitundu. A lot of the same issues came up, which indicates that some of the challenges that people are facing are not isolated to one area.

I am very motivated at the moment – motivated about the work that we are doing, motivated by how it is going and motivated about the fact that I love doing it! I feel like I’ve pasted the hump of floundering and not knowing what I was doing like I was feeling in the first weeks that I was here. There is a plan, and it feels good.


Violet, Moses and Me with Tasintha Co-operative Society