Women in south-western Burkina Faso have engaged in informal but prosperous trade in the last couple of years thanks to capital they raised and then fructified in the form of self-initiated, self-run microcredit. Since the introduction of the concept of microcredit in Bangladesh by Professor Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank, this path has frequently been suggested as one of the most effective cures for poverty. The suggested model implies a financial institution, generally a bank, which determines the rules of the game that the applicants need to comply with in order to have access to microcredit. However women in and around the town of Léo, some 160 km southwest of the capital, Ouagadougou, have developed an alternative,bank-less system whereby capital comes from, and returns to, the beneficiaries themselves.
The Nankouloubou association's self-initiated and self-run initiative shows that microcredit is, indeed, one important way to eradicate poverty. Unlike the bank-based microcredit counterpart, this completely homegrown solution presents a number of challenges. The association-based microcredit is manually managed, which raises issues of accuracy and exposes the entire process to calculation errors. Idayatou, the ...[view whole blog post ]