8/30: A Very Long Post About How We Are Learning a Lot

Note: pictures recently added (9/29/06).

So much has happened since our last update that it’s hard to know where to begin. While it hasn’t all been easy, we have certainly learned more in the past week and a half than we have in all the rest of our time here in Bangladesh.

On August 17^th the Nari Jibon Microcredit Project awarded its first loan to the women’s cooperative to start their business. Actually, it turned out that we gave two separate loans to two separate businesses. Although we had been working with twelve women together as a group, their business interests and skills were so different that creating two cooperatives instead of one was much more realistic.

To give these loans, we held a small ceremony and pulled out all the stops to make it seem as official as possible. There were all sorts of forms to be signed (including one form which was printed on this kind of official government legal paper which you pay about $1 for each piece, but it really makes an impact). We also decided to have every person sign every form with their name in addition to their thumb print because there are at least a couple women in the group who have a hard time signing their names, so we didn’t want anyone to stand out if they couldn’t sign their name fully (see some pictures of signing and thumprinting the certificates here). We also gave each woman a certificate acknowledging her completion of the business class taught by Women for Women. Something we have learned in our time here is that to Bangladeshi women, specifically those with little to no formal education, the physical recognition of her participation in any sort of skill-building program is extremely highly regarded. As one wise advisor said to me: “never underestimate the importance of certificates in Bangladesh.” (See a picture of Bela, one of the Cooperative members, receiving her certificate here).

The Fish and Vegetable Shop

Six of the women have a lot of experience in selling vegetables, fish, and other groceries. Some of them currently work in a small dirt-floored open-air stall which the group has decided to invest in fixing up. They want to put a roof on the shop and rebuild the walls and maybe even lay down some cement to make a real floor. They are also planning on buying a freezer to store the fish in, which would really develop their businesses into something much bigger than what they’re doing now: it would mean being able to keep fish fresh for a number of days, as opposed to what they’re doing now, where at the end of the day, any remaining stock has to be thrown out. The idea of buying a freezer for their shop would have otherwise been unthinkable for these women. See pictures here of fish businesses like the ones that the women have now.

To hear them talk about what they imagine this doing for their business is truly a poignant testament to what they can accomplish with a little help from us and a lot of help from each other.

See a picture of the Vegetable and Fish Cooperative receiving their loan here.

The Clothing Shop

The other six women are all in the clothing business, either as tailors or as vendors out of their homes of saris and salwar-kameez (both kinds of traditional clothing for Bangladeshi women). They have decided to start a tailoring shop where they will sell clothing and fabric.

Additionally, they have decided to diversify by expanding to selling cosmetics and some children’s toys (because they think women in their neighborhood would buy toys for their kids while they’re in having some clothing made for themselves). Their plan is ambitious and exciting, and is well beyond the scope of any of their businesses, or the business of any woman they know, for that matter. They’re going to need sewing machines and display cabinets to expand the business to this scale, and they have arranged with a landlord to rent a shop twice the size of any other shop that any woman in the area runs.

See a picture of the Tailoring Cooperative receiving their loan here.

Unanticipated Problems…

However, soon after the loans were awarded, the problems we were told to anticipate began to pop up.

Three of the women in the group each took a small portion of the money and spent it on personal expenses unrelated to the cooperative. While this at first seemed to us to be a major crisis, it now seems to be a very resolvable issue which will continue to be a great learning experience for everyone involved.

First of all, it seems clear that the women took the money at the urging of their husbands who wanted it for their own personal businesses. In fact, the problem came to our attention when the 3 husbands called one of our project staff complaining that they hadn’t gotten more money for themselves. When we met with the women the following day, we insisted that only the women be present at the meeting, although many of the husbands had gathered to join in.

After a great deal of discussion, the women agreed they had all made some mistakes and they wanted to figure out how to make things better.

Moving Forward

Our experience during the last week has drawn to our attention two key issues that are ignored in other microcredit programs, but which the Nari Jibon Microcredit Project is prepared to address – Mutual Accountability and the Role of Patriarchy in Microcredit Programs:

Mutual Accountability

The Nari Jibon Microcredit Project’s goal is to assist in women’s empowerment through their mutual accountability and respect. After the recent setbacks, we are clearly need more work to ensure this mutual accountability is maintained; but as you will read below, the women are already addressing this issue on their own.

The women have decided to regroup next week. Before then, they will work together to develop a more comprehensive plan for how the cooperative will operate in the future. They will also decide how profits will be shared, and the rules by which each member will participate.

They will also develop a more detailed business plan that we and they will use to monitor their progress. Then the Project Staff will work with the women to evaluate these plans and talk with them about how to ensure their implementation

The Role of Patriarchy

We have also realized that in order to challenge patriarchy in this patriarchal society, we will not succeed by simply ignoring it.

It is culturally accepted that every woman in Bangladesh has a man who is somehow responsible for her. This man is called her “guardian.” If she doesn’t have a husband, that man is her father or her brother, or even sometimes her son. When we arrived in the country, Kasia had to answer a question on the entry application which said “Name of Father or Husband.” There is no equivalent question for Anders. Based on our growing understanding of these cultural dynamics, we have decided to directly address the “elephant in the living room” of women’s empowerment work in Bangladesh: that no matter what your program aims to change, men are still ultimately in control of women’s lives.

The process of acknowledging the role of men in the empowerment of women has been very interesting for us, and we think that it will be an important element of ensuring the complete success of the project.

Even if every woman in the Nari Jibon Cooperative understood the project perfectly and the role she plays in it, if their “guardians” don’t understand and accept the role of women in the group, the cooperative will not be successful. Therefore, we need to recognize the role that their “guardians” play in their lives, because the guardians’ respect for the cooperative project is integral to its success.

So in the next week, we are going to have meetings with all of the husbands and brothers and talk to them about our goals for the project and exactly how it will operate. We will have Sujan, one of the male research staff, conducting these meetings because these conversations will only be effective if they are between men.

The Good News

In spite of the setbacks and occasional feelings of despondency, on the whole, the problems we faced during the last week have had a remarkably positive impact on us and our work. As we reflect on the implications of the problems, we realize how important these problems have been to our understanding of Bangladesh and the Nari Jibon Microcredit Model.

Learning from an Expert

It is unheard of in Bangladesh to give this much money (300,000 taka, which is about $4,285) to women who are this poor. The risk involved with giving women this much money directly is much higher than any other microcredit organization in Dhaka has been willing to undertake.

However, we have recently met Tim Steel, a British development worker here in Dhaka. Tim has retired from the corporate world into the world of social change, having spent his career working in top positions at Sony, Jaguar, and other major corporations (he also headed up the first anti-AIDS campaign in the UK).

We’ve been spending a lot of time with him and are learning a great deal from him. He adds a unique perspective to our work which involves a more business-oriented take on how development can be most successful. Although Tim doesn’t particularly care for microcredit programs in general, he is really enthusiastic about our project and says that it is exciting because the bigger the risks you take, the bigger potential you have for success. We are looking forward to continuing to work closely with Tim as an advisor and friend while we are in Dhaka.

Newfound Understanding

As for ourselves, we have developed a much more complex understanding of these women, and of all the cultural factors which are bound up with our communication with them, their relationships with each other, and all of our work in this project. This newfound (and growing) understanding of the cultural implications of the project has already proven to be a major asset to our ability to overcome the barriers to the project’s success.

We have now come to realize what a truly ambitious project this is, and what a huge thing we and the Nari Jibon Cooperative women are trying to accomplish. We are challenging everything about the limited power these women have been given all of their lives due to their gender and their economic position.

Clearly some of them might not be able to handle these changes as well as others. However, the changes we are already seeing are monumental, given what we (and they) are up against. While we were temporarily disheartened, we now realize that we are really changing things – and change takes time.

Implications for the Nari Jibon Microcredit Model

Despite the temporary setbacks, the good news is that we are learning more and more about the ways in which the Nari Jibon Microcredit Model is more capable of addressing the root causes of poverty than the prevailing microcredit models.

In most microcredit programs, although the woman is the one who takes the loan, it is customarily used by her husband, while she still retains the responsibility for repayment. With this model, the women retain control over the loan by keeping it within the cooperative. Unfortunately, the money which was mistakenly given to individual women when we initially gave the loan was predictably handed over to their husbands. This indicates that (barring diversions from the model), our model can be successful in this regard.

Furthermore, in Bangladesh microcredit programs have proliferated without substantially improving the lives of their constituents. Microcredit programs are often locally used as mechanisms to maintain cash flow, much the way Americans use credit cards for cash flow. These microcredit loans are commonly repaid with loans from other microcredit firms, creating a cycle of debt that can never really eradicate the poverty that the people of Bangladesh face.

However, the Nari Jibon Microcredit Model is different from other microcredit systems, in three important ways.

First, the Nari Jibon Microcredit Model was structured to provide women enough money and resources to amass productive assets that can truly and permanently empower them. The Nari Jibon Model is not a cash flow loan, but a means to substantively different employment and business opportunities.

Second, the Nari Jibon Microcredit Model incorporates education and technical resources for borrowers. We believe that if microcredit lenders can help the women’s cooperatives manage their own money more efficiently (through education, technical support and planning), the Nari Jibon Microcredit Model will be a major breakthrough in giving women themselves control over their financial resources.

Third, the Nari Jibon Microcredit Model requires collective action which assists individual women in a mutually supportive and accountable relationship. Without the collective, women are constantly at risk of losing their assets and their power.

8/7: Exhausted, but Exhilarated

Since we last wrote a proper project update, we have made amazing progress. We have had a number of exciting developments, after each of which we say, exhilarated, “let’s write an update about this!” Unfortunately, the nature of these developments is that they have taken up so much of our time and energy that we haven’t had much time for anything else, including writing updates. A few days ago we both caught this horrible viral flu that has been going around Dhaka and we’ve been home sick ever since then, giving us time to write an update and to realize that even with all the work we’ve got, we really need to start giving ourselves some weekends.

Local NGO Women for Women will Teach our Business Classes!

First of all, since about a week after arriving, we had been hugely stressed out trying to figure out how to get a curriculum together for the women’s business class. Upon our arrival in Bangladesh, we found out that the existing business class at Nari Jibon which we intended to enroll the participants in our program in was impractical for their needs. Unfortunately, it was clear to us from the beginning that we are wholly unequipped to teach a business class to women entrepreneurs of the slums of Dhaka, but there wasn’t anyone else around who was either. While we were searching for some direction in this mess, we came across a curriculum developed by Women for Women, a local NGO which, founded in 1973, is one of the mainstays of the Dhaka feminist community. You can read more about them here. A few years ago, with funding from JICA, the Japanese equivalent of USAID (the American international aid organization), they put together a business class which was exactly what we were looking for. It was geared toward women with an entrepreneurial spirit, exactly the kind of group we’re dealing with. In the summary of their project, they said that the primary obstacle for the women they were working with was that they didn’t have any sources of capital to start their new businesses, and it was clear that not only did we need a project like theirs, but they also needed a project like ours!

So, we decided to call up Mahmuda Islam, Executive Director of Women for Women (and a very famous Dhaka feminist scholar and activist). She graciously agreed to meet with us about getting in touch with the class’ original teachers and perhaps getting a hold of the content of their classes. During our meeting, she went even farther by offering to have the original teachers of the Women for Women business class teach our students the same class themselves. So, despite some stress in the beginning, things worked out better than we ever could have hoped for! It doesn’t get much better than this. See pictures of the business class here.

We had originally planned to have the classes stretch over about a month and a half, but the women in the group asked us to expedite the process. Because of their goal to get the business up and running before Ramadan, we decided to hold the class over a period of 2 weeks. The Women for Women trainers agreed to this and now the classes are in full swing. We are particularly looking forward to having the help of Women for Women in evaluating the progress of our group and their business plan. The project is really lucky to have this partnership, and we think that we will be a great deal more successful because of it.

Another Visit to East Rampura

We are starting to make semi-regular visits to East Rampura, to visit the women we’re working with. This time they wanted to show us their homes, which was a really incredibly experience. Slums in Dhaka are all pretty much the same: there might be one larger house or apartment, and then a number of “houses” surrounding that, which consist of one small room which houses an entire family. The nicer ones have cement walls and floors and cost around $50/month for rent. The others are more like what you might expect in a rural area (we have been surprised to find houses like these in the middle of the city), with dirt floors and walls made of corrugated tin and scrap wood and metal – these cost more like $15/month. Consistently, their hospitality is overwhelming and incredibly generous, so we had to insist this time that they didn’t buy us any food or drinks (people usually buy us Pepsi when we visit their houses) because otherwise our visits would turn into a major expense for them, which we don’t want. You can see some pictures of their houses here, here, here, and here.

Launching the Research Project

Also since our last update, we have laid the groundwork for a serious academic research assessment of our project. This will involve a series of in-depth interviews with the women in the group to determine the effects the project will have on their lives. To do this, we have hired a field worker, Bina, who has a lot of experience with this kind of research, and who worked with Kathy Ward on her earlier research on women in Dhaka. We already are very impressed with her work, and we trust her a great deal. Bina can ask the women questions that we can’t necessarily ask them, like about their incomes and their relationships with their husbands. We’re lucky to have her working with us, as she can catch a lot of things that we might miss, due to our relative unfamiliarity with Bangladeshi culture, customs, and language. Bina takes notes on all of our field visits, as well as conducts on her own all of the in-depth interviews with the women. She just started doing the baseline interviews a few days ago, and we’re getting excited to see the results. Over the course of the next few months, she will continue to interview the women, asking similar questions, and we will see how their responses change. We have been lucky, in developing our questionnaires, to have access to a whole range of questionnaires which have been used in past studies evaluating microcredit projects, as well as other studies examining women’s empowerment and gender relations in Bangladesh. What would we do without the internet!?! Right here from our laptop, we have access to databases so extensive that it’s almost like sitting in our college libraries. These research tools will be the primary instruments in measuring the successes of our project. (See some pictures of Bina getting down to business in East Rampura here and here).

8/2: Khala's Former Garment Factory

A couple days ago, Khala took us to the garment factory where she worked for 18 years. This factory was where she met all of the women who are participating in the cooperative. The clothes we saw being made had tags for J.C. Penney. The factory owner told us that they also make a lot of clothes for Walmart.

Having half-expected to walk into the factory and find young emaciated children chained to their work stations, we were actually surprised by what seemed to be high standards for working conditions. The factory was reasonably well ventilated, there were lists of labor rights posted on the wall, and some of the employees were even using safety equipment. The real problem is with the workers’ wages, which are well below a living wage, even for Bangladeshi standards.

In 1987, when Khala started working at this garment factory, the salary of the women working there (6 days a week, 8:00am to 8:00pm with a 1-hour lunch break) was roughly $3 per month. If she worked overtime (meaning 8:00am to 10:00pm), she made $6 per month. Today the salary of the workers is much higher: the minimum wage is about $15 and with overtime they can make up to $30. Even in Bangladesh, this is not enough money to raise a family.

See some pictures of the garment factory: here, here, and here.