Welcome to Ghana - Part 1: A Day With A Loan Officer
Welcome to Ghana.
Makola Market, Accra, Ghana
Over the next couple of days I will be posting stories from my trip to Ghana. I would have posted them while I was there, but as you can imagine, the Internet was spotty.
We arrived on the 23rd, which also happened to be my 25th birthday! Needless to say, this was going to be a pretty sweet birthday.
For those of you that don’t know why I was going, I’ll set the stage for you.
My dad is on 2 boards with Opportunity International, a Christian microfinance organization. The way Opportunity primarily works is by making small loans to, primarily, groups of women in the 3rd world. The loans can start as small as $50 and grow over time. Since the loans are often entrusted to the trust group, the repayment rate is extremely high, about 97%. The reason for this is quite simple, if someone doesn’t make payments on her loan, then the group will sell off that person’s work materials to make the loan.
Opportunity is a Christian organization. They believe that everyone that is willing to work hard should be able to get a loan. Christ called us to serve the poor, and the Bible talks about it over 2000 times.. This is our mandate. Big banks can’t service a $50 loan. How do you ask a bank employee used to $100,000 mortgages and loans to collect on a $50 loan? It’s just not the same. In Ghana, Opportunity serves about 60,000 clients each year. Worldwide, they have over 1.2 million clients. Check out their website at Opportunity International Site
The second organization that my dad works with is Living Water International. I am a huge fan of LWI. Living Water does basically only 3 things. They build wells, repair/refurbish wells, and health/hygene training. That’s it. But they do it really, really, really well. They drill and repair around 1600-1700 wells a year. Since 1990, they have built and repaired wells that serve over 6.9 million people…and that’s just up to 2008, by now, who knows? Check out their website at Living Water Website
The stage is set, on with the show!
Monday was fairly uneventful, we arrived in Accra (the capitol) checked into the Holiday Inn (amazingly, the nicest hotel in the city), and ate. That’s about it. As such, I’m going to skip ahead to Tuesday.
We woke up Tuesday morning and started about our day.
We ate our breakfast, which for me consisted largely of croissants and discussed our plans for the day. My dad had tons of meetings, so I wasn’t going to see him until lunch, which was fine.
Since I didn’t come to Ghana to get stuck in an office, they let me tag along with a loan officer on her route. I was honored because almost no one has done this, not even my dad who’s been with Opportunity for 4 years.
Sharon with a client in Makola Market
Sharon was her name. She’s pictured here with a client of hers in Makola market. Sharon is a new loan officer and the niece of a good friend of my dad’s, Reverend Kwabena Darko. I’ll be writing an entire post about him another day.
Sharon told me that she had over 250 clients. 250 clients. That’s pretty normal. Another microfinance org named Sinapi can reach up to 400 per officer.
We met several different women during the day, many of whom had been with Opportunity for 6 years or more, which is a long time in a country where it’s hard to plan ahead.
One woman, Auntie Josephine, started a small stand where she sold produce, onions I believe, not uncommon at the Makola. After several loans, she was able to expand her sales area to about 400 sq ft or so. It was tough to tell where the borders of her shop were, but it was easy to see it was one of the largest around. Not to mention, she even had employees.
Auntie Josephine in her Shop
I couldn’t believe my eyes. The idea that something so small as a $100 loan could help this woman to run a shop as large as my last apartment, was amazing. In America it’s not that much money, but hard workers don’t need a lot in order to succeed. Now, I suspect her loans are in the thousands if I had to guess.
Another woman collected nuts and sold them wholesale to other merchants and restaurants. She too had been with Opportunity for a very long time, and had received over 10 loans (if memory serves me). Today, thanks to a loan she received from Opportunity, she now grinds nuts to make her own pastes, like peanut butter.
Client selling Nuts and Beans
A third woman sold clothing accessories. She too had been with Opportunity for many years…noticing a pattern? She started small and wound up with multiple stalls and several employees. When she spoke with Sharon, even though I couldn’t understand it all, I could feel the pride she had in her work…and her self.
Woman in her bead shop (Owner on the left)
What does this mean for Christian community? This isn’t charity, these are hard-working people, people that just want a chance. They aren’t asking for anything that you or I haven’t gotten automatically due to our heritage and geography.
The way we serve them is not to sympathize, but to empathize. We are all there, whether we are poor in resources, poor in confidence, or poor in faith.
We must realize that we must do our absolute best to guarantee them every right we can by way of Microloans and other services like it. Loans and money aren’t the only answers either, but in this case, they sure are a good start.
Until next time!
Amen.