A holistic approach

Empowering women through the WDB Trust extends far beyond lending them money. What makes the trust so instrumental in changing the lives of rural women is the emphasis placed on giving them dignity and instilling within them a sense of self-confidence, which is what ultimately gives them the ability to change their own lives, and by so doing, the lives of their children, extended families and communities.

Totsie Memela, the newly appointed CEO of the WDB Trust, says that the idea of dignity is present at the very outset of the relationship between the trust and its customers. An important component of the WDB Trust is the creation of the Siyakhula (We are Growing) Programme as a microfinance component in providing access to the households at the bottom of the poverty pyramid to valuable financial services (credit or working capital). This capital can be used either to start up an income generating activity or scale up existing income generating survival skills.

The Siyakhula Programme is undertaken through a network of village-based centres and branches that empower women to transform their lives towards sustainable livelihood opportunities. The programme is founded on the Grameen Bank philosophy of “Banking on the Poorest Women”. Siyakhula targets the poorest households by motivating them to empower themselves through the formation of a group of up to 25 like-minded women to manage accessibility to working capital in the absence of material collateral.

By providing a small initial loan of up to R500, the Siyakhula Microfinance Pro- gramme assists poor women in rural communities to facilitate their income generating survival skills.

“Many of these women are completely illiterate and cannot even spell their own names,” Memela says. To this end, Siyakhula provides a five-day “empowering orientation programme” to all potential clients geared towards helping them to understand their rights to WDB Trust credit, their individual responsibility towards the use of the valuable financial assistance and their collective responsibility towards ensuring credit discipline so as to access much larger subsequent loans. More than money The services extended by the WDB Trust to rural women in some of the poorest areas of SA are not only financial in nature. “We teach them to read the fine print before they sign on the dotted line and to understand exactly what they’re signing,” says Memela.

Additional nonfinancial assistance comprises linking women to technology through an ICT programme that provides them with computer-based literacy training.

The Trust provides the working capital for these women to generate their own incomes and extend their capabilities.

“One of our customers in Limpopo has a business selling ice cream to children after school,” says Memela.

“She wanted to extend her services by providing breakfast for the pupils, as they often leave home too early to eat. But she lacked the necessary capital to extend her offering.” This is where the trust comes in. Essentially, it provides a step-up programme in which customers have four to six months to pay back their initial loan, after which