Hunger Blog

A Sense of Urgency for Kadia and Her Children

These days, everyone is looking at the bottom line and cutting back. Freedom from Hunger is no different as it considers where to apply scarce resources for greatest impact. For us, that means focusing even more on what we do best for the people who need us most-like Kadia Cissé, who lives in rural Mali. She is one of the “chronically hungry poor” who cannot reliably feed her family enough good food every day. She has three children and no husband. Her home-based business is earning her just a dollar a day. She and her children have health problems that prevent her from earning more money. The simple fact of distance, which often must be traveled barefooted, severely limits their access to healthcare, education, and profitable markets for their goods. It also costs a lot more to reach them with services than it does to reach the urban poor.

What Freedom from Hunger knows best is how to make microfinance work for Kadia and millions of other women like her in the rural communities of the developing world. This is special knowledge, which we seek to strengthen and share widely in microfinance circles. The reason this is such a priority is that the people in the most difficult circumstances live in rural areas. The simple fact of distance, which often must be traveled barefooted, severely limits their access to healthcare, education, and profitable markets for their goods. It also costs a lot more to reach them with services than it does to reach the urban poor. So, Kadia, and millions of women like her, are bypassed by microfinance services in favor of better-off clients who live in towns and cities.

But Freedom from Hunger knows how to help Kadia with financially self-sustaining microfinance services. We know Kadia is ready to use these services to support her own self-help efforts-and she needs our help now.

Lives are on the Line

Indeed, the world financial and food crisis is worsening. But we have an approach that works for those most vulnerable. More than ever, our focus has to be on sharing this approach as widely as we can. Kadia and 800 million other people living in similar conditions are in daily jeopardy of tragedy. Knowing this, we must respond. And we will.

This fall, as clouds gathered on the economic horizon, Freedom from Hunger prepared for tough times by taking a hard look at its programs and support operations. Recognizing that we must reduce expenses substantially, we chose to concentrate on program services most likely to help women like Kadia. We pared down and streamlined our programs and operations in order to concentrate our best and most efficient efforts on bringing microfinance and other key services to families neglected by other microfinance organizations.

Compelling Evidence from the Field

For the past 20 years, Freedom from Hunger has conducted a grand experiment. First, we adapted the pioneering group-based lending methods of Grameen Bank and FINCA village banking to serve even the dispersed rural villages of the West African savanna and the Andean high plateaus at affordable interest rates that cover costs of service delivery. We immediately concluded that money alone wasn’t the answer. Anyone paying attention could see that very poor people have a whole host of problems that hinder, if not directly prevent, an improvement in their economic status, food security, and health-even when they do have access to credit and a safe place to save money. However, we discovered a stunning advantage when groups of women are willing to meet regularly-not just to access loans and repay them, but to learn new ways to dramatically improve their situations. The opportunity to add simple, low-cost education and health services to microfinance meetings is so compelling that we were surprised that others resisted doing it! If ever there was a moment of “uncommon sense,” this was it.

Starting with the basic principles of adult education, we designed a new approach to education specifically to work in the setting of regular group microfinance meetings. One of the many hurdles women in poverty face is that so many of them are under-educated and often illiterate and innumerate. That meant our curriculum was best shared in conversation, building on what the women already know and adding life-saving information, shared through story, role play and visual aids. Our methods not only impart new information to the women but actually lead them to change their business, health and nutrition practices, to have an immediate impact on hunger, poverty, and health of their families.

Right away, women took what they learned about diarrhea and started giving their babies more liquid when they fell ill. They took their lessons on nutrition and added more vegetables and protein to their children’s meals. They took information on AIDS, malaria and common childhood illnesses and organized themselves to fight the diseases and seek treatment.

This newly gained knowledge was leveraged by the fact that at the same time they were learning, the women were earning the money they needed to act. The loans increased their profits, and learning sessions on business management, increasing sales, household budgeting and savings, and even basic accounting equipped the women with-as they like to call it-”the skills of business women.” Right before our eyes, women like Kadia were transformed from hopeless to determined.

I encourage you to visit our publications page to learn more about the studies that document this progress. Freedom from Hunger takes research and documentation seriously, because when you set out to prove the prevailing wisdom falls short, you had better be armed with research results that back up your claims!

It would be misleading to imply that we did this all ourselves. Freedom from Hunger has never been a large organization; rather than waste resources trying to become a “household name” brand, we focus on showing others how to make microfinance work for people so poor they are chronically hungry. We teach and support an army of local organizations who share our determination to reach people overlooked by other organizations. As fast as we can develop new curriculum and new systems to better support group-based microfinance, our local partners were willing and able to be trained to use these tools for the benefit of poor, rural women. If our small size is viewed by others as a problem, they should take note that our work is now being carried on by 60 staff supporting more than 250 organizations and thousands of dedicated local people who are continually adding to our own knowledge and innovation. And, through them, our program innovations are reaching over 1.2 million women and their families.

***

Please take a moment to learn more about Freedom from Hunger’s innovative programs to help the vulnerable poor end their own hunger for good. Information about our priority programs-Credit with Education, Saving for Change, the Microfinance and Health Protection Initiative, and our new HealthKeepers program-is available on this website.