THE PILLARS
In this section:
Microloans Are Helping Uganda Villagers Get Mobile Phone Service
Leasing Company Helps Armenian Firms Get Equipment
Schools and Shelter Provided to Filipinos Who Fled Fighting
Nigerian Journalists Monitor, Counter HIV/AIDS Stigma
ECONOMIC GROWTH, AGRICULTURE, AND TRADE
Microloans Are Helping Uganda Villagers Get Mobile Phone Service
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Fatima Serwoni, in the village of Namunsi in Mbale district, is one of 700 "village phone" operators throughout Uganda. Serwoni owns a small store, and has taken out 11 microcredit loans, some of which helped pay for the education of her four children. Grameen Foundation USA |
KAMPALA, Uganda—About 135 miles from this capital, Fatima Serwoni lives in the village of Namunsi, where she owns a small convenience shop and the village's only mobile phone. She lets customers use her cell phone for the same fee they would pay for a pay phone—if Namunsi had one.
Because the closest public pay phone is over two miles away, villagers use Serwoni's phone. In a village with no electricity, she uses an automobile battery to recharge her phone.
Serwoni is one of 700 "village phone" operators—mostly women—throughout Uganda. Each owns a small business and has at least one loan with one of seven microcredit institutions that lend to the poor.
Each new village phone owner borrows enough money to buy a kit with a mobile phone, antenna, connection cables, and a roadside advertising sign.
MTN Uganda, the country's largest phone operator, sells prepaid minutes to the village phone operators at a discounted rate. This allows the women to make enough to repay their loans and earn a profit.
Serwoni has taken out 11 loans from a local microlending institution. She used the first loans to stock up the shelves of her store. Then she borrowed to send four of her children to school.
"We thought that the village phone model was a great way to enable microcredit borrowers to use a technology tool to both establish a viable business for themselves and help people in their communities to have better access to communication," said Tim Woods, the program manager with the Grameen Technology Center, a distant cousin of the Grameen Bank, the pioneering microcredit institution that has loaned some $4 billion in South Asia since 1976.
Grameen Telecom, another cousin in the Grameen family, has run a village phone program in Bangladesh since 1997. That program recently won the Petersburg Prize, a prestigious technology-in-development award, in recognition of its power as a model of telecommunications innovation.
The first phones were shipped to Ugandan village operators in March 2003. By 2008, the program aims to reach 5,000 small business owners and serve 5 million people.
USAID's Bureau for Economic Growth, Agriculture, and Trade (EGAT) invested $25,000 in the program in its early days. The funds helped pay for an expert from Grameen Bank to help replicate the Bangladesh program in Uganda.
There is a major difference in the Uganda model versus the program in Bangladesh, which relied on substantial labor to produce and process monthly statements and bills. This was found to be uneconomical in Uganda, and was replaced with a precard card billing system.
"Grameen requested EGAT's assistance at a critical, early stage," said Jeff Cochrane, EGAT team leader for information technology. "We are particularly intrigued by the business model for village phones as one of many innovations in our basket of solutions under the Administrator's Last Mile Initiative. We see great potential to replicate this model worldwide."
The Last Mile Initiative seeks to expand voice and internet services to underserved populations in developing countries. It focuses on rural areas, especially seeking to benefit small business owners.
GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT ALLIANCE
Leasing Company Helps Armenian Firms Get Equipment
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Farmers of Lori Marz, Armenia, inspect new tractors and other mechanized agricultural equipment available through lease contracts. Development Alternatives, Inc. |
YEREVAN, Armenia—Farmers, dentists, and businessmen in Armenia can lease equipment and pay for it over time instead of raising money upfront to buy it, thanks to a public-private partnership of local and international financial companies.
Originally meant to help farmers obtain tractors and other equipment, the first leasing company in Armenia has also helped a dentist starting his own practice acquire dental equipment.
It also helped a yeast company get packaging equipment to compete against imports.
Loans are hard to come by in post-Soviet Armenia. The lack of credit is a major brake on small and medium-sized companies struggling to take the place of failed, state-owned enterprises.
In a leasing arrangement, a lender retains ownership of the asset. The leasing company can take back its property, should a client stop paying. But once a client pays off a lease, the equipment is his to keep.
A leasing company earns a profit by charging clients to use its property. Clients need to show they can generate enough cash to pay every month. If the leased equipment raises a client's productivity and earnings, the arrangement is a win-win proposition.
More than 80 separate leases—involving $1 million worth of equipment—had been signed as of July 2004 by the Agricultural Cooperative Bank of Armenia Leasing Company. The revenues generated from leasing equipment should eventually allow the business to run without donor subsidies.
"This public-private investment shows that it's possible to create private enterprises that serve the needs of developing economies," said John Caracciolo, who manages the project for USAID.
USAID helped Armenia revise legislation and establish a system for registering movable property, contributing $1.2 million in technical assistance and seed capital.
The Agency leveraged an additional $1 million in shareholder equity and $3 million in line-of-credit financing from the French bank, Credit Agricole, the Lebanese Leasing Company, and the International Finance Corporation (IFC), which is the market-based lending arm of the World Bank.
"Bank loans usually require collateral and extensive paperwork—leasing doesn't," said Carraciolo. "Leasing is a good alternative for startup businesses that don't have a credit history or collateral. And it increases capital investment in an economy and competes with bank lending."
The leasing company is a subsidiary of the Agricultural Cooperative Bank of Armenia, and works out of its branches throughout the country.
Since the company buys equipment at a client's request, increased market demand—for tractors in particular—is reshaping the market. The first set of farmers who wanted to lease tractors preferred a Chinese tractor over the Belarusian model available on the local market.
A devastating earthquake in 1988, the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the collapse of the Russian ruble in 1993 left the Armenian economy in shambles and spelled an end to the large-scale, state-owned agricultural and industrial enterprises of the Soviet-era economy.
DEMOCRACY, CONFLICT, AND HUMANITARIAN ASSISTANCE
Schools and Shelter Provided to Filipinos Who Fled Fighting
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A teacher helps a preschooler with her letters in a learning center for internally displaced people in Papalungan Maguidanao. The center was established by the Filipino NGO Community and Family Services International, a member of the Mindanao Emergency Response Network. Save the Children |
MANILA, Philippines—Tens of thousands of people displaced from their homes in Mindanao by fighting between the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and the Philippine government have been offered shelter and their children offered schooling through a new U.S. humanitarian aid program.
Although a ceasefire was declared in 2001, about 400,000 people fled their homes after a resurgence of the conflict in 2003. Many have returned since a ceasefire was reestablished, but insecurity and extreme poverty continue to burden the region.
A network of 40 local and international NGOs came together in 2003 to provide assistance to the displaced. More than 50,000 displaced residents have benefited from their aid.
The Mindanao Emergency Response Network (MERN), set up through Save the Children, "symbolizes a Mindanao where diverse people live in harmony," said Cynthia Guerra, the program manager.
USAID invested $550,000 in the project, which began in March 2003 and runs for two years. The network set up two stockpiles of emergency supplies such as blankets, shelter materials, and mosquito nets in Cotabato City and Zamboanga City.
Save the Children also provides grants for humanitarian assistance projects of up to $5,000 to local NGOs such as Community and Family Services International, which fixed four emergency shelters.
The shelters are also being used as emergency learning centers for children in the displaced persons camp. Volunteers serve as teachers.
Grants have also been given to groups assisting children and adults with disabilities, providing psychosocial assistance, building and repairing water systems, and establishing emergency medical and dental programs.
Other small grants trained local NGO staff on how best to deliver humanitarian assistance. Training sessions addressed topics such as emergency assessments and return or reintegration of internally displaced persons. The NGO members also adopted joint performance standards and a code of conduct.
The project has had its challenges. Organizing MERN members to cooperate on the emergency response network took time and effort. Last August, Save the Children staff member Theresa Marquez drowned when her boat capsized while she was delivering emergency supplies.
As a followup to the network, USAID plans a new project to assist people who have returned to their home communities in the Liguasan Marsh area of Central Mindanao. It will offer emergency water and sanitation services—such as repairing wells—and will provide fishing nets, agricultural seeds and tools, and other items so that families can restart their lives and livelihoods.
Although the government reached a peace agreement with the MNLF in 1996, the MILF—a splinter group—continues the decades-long conflict with the Philippine government.
The MILF publicly condemned terrorism in 2003, but the death of its leader, Salamat Hashim, left negotiations with President Gloria Arroyo's government in limbo.
The ceasefire has generally held in the past year and, with the May election of a new Arroyo administration, it is hoped that formal peace negotiations will resume soon.
Sarah McNiece contributed to this article.
GLOBAL HEALTH
Nigerian Journalists Monitor, Counter HIV/AIDS Stigma
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Examples of HIV/AIDS reporting in Nigerian newspapers are collected by Journalists Against AIDS. Omololu Falobi, Journalists Against AIDS |
ABUJA, Nigeria—A year ago, Journalists Against AIDS, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) more commonly known as JAAIDS, became Africa's leading NGO delegate to the board of the United Nations' Program on HIV/AIDS.
A year later, at the 15th International AIDS Conference in Bangkok, the group presented several papers discussing lessons learned and ways to fight stigma and discrimination against people living with the disease.
JAAIDS, which educates Nigerian journalists about HIV/AIDS, has received some $195,000 in funding from USAID to train reporters, provide them with various tools and resources, and monitor and analyze media coverage of HIV-positive persons.
About 4 million of Nigeria's 137 million people live with HIV/AIDS. But with some 170,000 new cases annually of the disease, fighting discrimination against people living with HIV/AIDS and raising awareness for the need for affordable treatment in Nigeria are issues that USAID wants to support, said Sandra Jordan of the Bureau for Global Health.
"The media forms a critical component in informing, shaping, and influencing societal values, perceptions, and attitudes towards literally any subject," she said. "The need for the media to be comprehensively involved in the fight against the [HIV/AIDS] pandemic is crucial."
Over the past two years, JAAIDS trained some 200 reporters on how to look for accurate data regarding HIV/AIDS and write in ways that do not stigmatize people with AIDS.
The group also holds 11 media roundtables a year. At July's roundtable, the topic of discussion was the spread of HIV/AIDS in Nigerian prisons. Among the speakers was the medical director of the Nigerian Prisons Service. Participating journalists learned about the growing problem, and later organized a prison tour to see the problem first-hand.
JAAIDS organizes similar policy roundtable discussions and workshops to bring together journalists with healthcare providers and people living with AIDS.
Aside from training and discussion, the group offers information tools and some oversight for Nigerian media.
JAAIDS publishes a monthly analysis of HIV/AIDS print media coverage, which is distributed to media editors and reporters and posted online. JAAIDS staff sift through Nigeria's major daily newspapers and eight weekly magazines, examining the use of language, presentation, prominence of usage, topics covered, use of pictures and illustrations, and sources of information.
The group annually hands out an award to reporters and news organizations in recognition of coverage focused on prevention and care of HIV/AIDS.
To help reporters stay abreast of HIV/AIDS news, JAAIDS runs several websites and newsletters. An example is AIDS News Service, a 16-page monthly bulletin about HIV/AIDS and reproductive health problems that goes out to some 4,000 reporters, editors, and media managers free of charge.
JAAIDS also runs a website that features policy documents, research reports, studies, and news relevant to the HIV/AIDS situation in Nigeria and statistics on the epidemic for 16 countries in West Africa.
Although based in Nigeria, JAAIDS has lent a helping hand to reporters in neighboring countries such as Kenya and Ethiopia.
