Regional Advisory Information and Network Systems (RAINS)
Contributing to poverty reduction amongst women in Northern Ghana.
Aim: To enhance opportunities for self income generation to 100 women in Northern Ghana.
Background: In Northern Ghana many young people leave school before completion. Even if they complete school, most face unemployment, with their only option being to work in the informal sector or marry an early age. At the same time availability of credit in Northern Ghana is not privileged, and women and young girls are grossly marginalised in ownership and control over resources and collateral assets demanded by banks.
Using microfinance, this project adopts innovative approaches to engage young women, aged 15-25, who hold enormous, untapped potential for changing the social and economic future of their families and communities.
The Programme: The Project makes a departure from traditional micro-financing and ensures that young people are effectively targeted and given appropriate support so that they can gain the skills needed to successfully and continually operate small businesses and also gain life skills for self-development.
This Project will offer Financial Services including enhancing and deepening Financial Literacy. Financial literacy includes modifying existing financial curricular to the local market. Subjects include savings, budgeting and managing bank accounts. This Project will also offer Non-Financial Services or Business Development Services (BDS). Some of the non-financial services that will compliment the financial services include education and awareness, asset building (mainly in the form of savings), business training, networking and mentoring. Of critical importance is financial literacy that will ensure that young people gain the knowledge, skills and attitudes required to embrace sound business and management practices including earning, spending, borrowing and investing. This also increases their self-esteem and enhances their ability to graduate and demand higher quality products and services from financial institutions.
Partners: RAINS has been working with women groups, young women and school leavers for the past 10 years. This experience has supported a number of women groups in over 40 villages using Microcredit, literacy and empowerment. Through these engagements RAINS has developed deeper relations with communities and policy level players at the local level. This catapulted into setting up the Borimanga Small Loans and Empowerment Product (BSLEP) that eventually grew to become the Borimanga Rural Bank and now extending financial services to over 6,000 clients. This application will further enhance the leadership role of RAINS in reaching out to truly large numbers of young women in need of financial mediation and business support.
Outcome: This project will provide women groups with access to financial resources and increased economic opportunities. In total, 100 women will women obtain skills and knowledge in various areas including record keeping, enterprise development and group dynamics.
Evaluation: The primary monitoring takes place by members themselves, and will revolve around their understanding of the project’s theory of change. The assumption of this initiative is that with the necessary training, mentoring, access to financial resources and information, young entrepreneurs can improve their earning capacity, acquire leadership skills, and emerge as stronger members of their communities.
The group members decide the modalities for managing available resources including equipment, allocation of funds to members as loans, track of savings and repayments, and monitor the use of funds to ensure that loans granted are used for the purposes they were taken. In order for the groups to manage their finances, they will be supported to open bank accounts, and field volunteers from amongst themselves and some of existing RAINS staff will conduct regular checks to ensure that accounts are properly maintained and activities carried out to plan.
Funding Required Tzedek will grant RAINS £14.000 over three years.
If you would like more information about RAINS or make a donation towards this project or another similar project please click here or call 020 7443 5121.
