Moving out of town..

Last week was the last week of my time at RAINS, so tomorrow morning I will be heading off to my new placement with Simli Pong, a micro-credit organisation based in Dalun out in the bush! Well, it's not really the bush, but that is how everyone I talk to is reacting: as if I am leaving the big city to go and live in a village. I'm looking forward to the change! The time with RAINS has been fantastic and I have learnt so much, especially about how NGOs operate and about girls' access to education and child labour. It also didn't hurt that the staff there are like a big family and were lots of fun to work with. I will really miss them but I know I want to learn some more while I am here, and I have been interested in micro-credit for a while now.

I was meant to leave for Dalun this morning, but my new boss told me that he had travelled, so was too tired to go in to work today. This sounds slack but is actually sensible: over here if you have to travel for a long distance one day you are kind of expected to take the next day off. After months of working like a white person I have realised that when in Ghana, you may as well do as the Ghanaians do, and slow down a bit...

So I took the chance to use my day off to do my washing, cause we had no water most of the weekend. This turned out to be due to protests by the local community that a neighbouring community was trying to join our water pipe line! I could hear lots of drumming on Saturday morning and I saw loads of men with picks and shovels who looked were laying a pipe. I was told that they were from Kanvili (the area next to my area, Jisonayili) where there is no water at all, so you always see them cycling over to our area to buy water. Because of a long-standing dispute over the pipe, the Jisonayili people didn't want them to access the pipe - so dismantled the pipe they had laid! The water came on for a few hours that night but was really dirty. I have yet to hear how the conflict will be resolved...

About my new placement, so far I know that Simli Pong (the name means Friendship Fund) gives small loans to people in the rural areas, mainly women, so that they can either start up a small business or expand their existing one. This is necessary because the banks won't lend such small amounts, and apparently the bank's interest rate is around 30% - too steep for a small business. They get together in groups and are jointly responsible for repayments: this increases the repayment rate and the group members can support each other. The loan is paid back in instalments over 6 to 12 months. It may sound unfair to loan mostly to women, but this is common practice in micro-credit. Experience has shown that women's repayment rate is higher than men and more important, loaning to women means the whole family benefits, whereas sadly the same is not always true of men. (Sorry guys!) If women get more income, a range of things improves for the whole family, for example the family's diet improves, their health improves, when they get sick they can access better treatment, the children's access to education improves, the family has some savings etc.

I'm very curious as to how the whole process works, so hopefully this week my education in micro-credit will begin in earnest..