Helping women become economically independent.

"I am the income source of my family. I never thought it would be possible."

Woman entrepreneur, New Delhi, India

Rosa, a young Mayan woman in the mountains of northern Guatemala, had tears and pride in her eyes as she told me that not only does her family no longer have to work for months each year as seasonal migrant labourers on the Pacific Coast, they also no longer even think about it. Why this change in her family's fortunes? The profits she had made by starting a small retail store in her village had been wisely invested in her family, who ate better, saved a little and could now stay together throughout the year.

She did this through training from K'aslemal--a Guatemalan human rights non-governmental organization (NGO)--and a small seed capital grant from the Trickle Up Program. Rosa is one of an estimated 250,000 of the poorest families, small landowners or landless, who in 1999 had to migrate to work on plantations in southern Guatemala or Mexico, prior to her access to micro-finance services through which she started her successful business.

The rise of the micro-finance movement over the last twenty years has been justifiably applauded as a tremendously important vehicle for allowing many women, traditionally denied access to affordable financial services, a means to realize more fully their income-generating capacity in order to step out of poverty. This is done through various models of business training, small loans, conditional grants, savings mobilization, market development and other services. Women tend to do better than men in investing earned profits in their children's nutrition, health and education.

In Rwanda and Guatemala where I travelled recently, women-headed households show more investment in home improvement than their male counterparts. Women tend to save more and spend primarily on their families rather than on themselves. Other benefits exist beyond the more obvious: many African women supported by Trickle Up state that they have more control over their choice of sexual partner when they are financially independent; thus, there may be a direct relationship between economic independence and stemming the spread of AIDS.

While opportunities have burgeoned, access to affordable micro-level financial services is still, however, by no means guaranteed for the majority of the world's poorest, who disproportionately are women.

They are often viewed as a risky prospect, even for a small loan and for this reason many programmes focus on the "richer" of the poor, rather than the very poorest. Therefore, there is a crying need for continued United Nations support to expand services, embracing models which ensure that the most marginalized populations and the geographically remote communities do not get excluded under current paradigms that stress the programme's financial sustainability at the expense of accessibility for those who most need it.

In the organization where I work, we focus on small conditional grants of seed capital combined with basic business-skills training opportunities for entrepreneurs among the very poorest in the developing world, for whom even a micro-loan is initially out of reach. We do not focus exclusively on women, although they comprise 70 per cent of those utilizing our programme. Working in cooperation with more than 200 primarily local and national NGOs, as well as with the UN Volunteers Programme and the United Nations Development Programme, we support a grass-roots network of opportunity spanning some thirty countries, fostering the creation and expansion of more than 10,000 micro-enterprises annually.

In our experience, the poorest women, for whom repaying a loan is not financially viable, can effectively utilize opportunities presented in small amounts of microventure capital and training to support themselves and their families through businesses in agriculture, retail, crafts and services. While gains at times appear to be small--eating twice instead of once a day--they can be enormous for thousands of families living perpetually on the edge of hunger. While there has been much success, there are still far too few opportunities for many of these poorest women to graduate to credit in order to expand their enterprises. Realizing the dream of a "seamless system" of access to credit, market development, training and business opportunities still requires much support from the United Nations and other institutions to become a reality.

It is a truism to state that poverty is multidimensional and that access to financial services alone is not an adequate answer for many of the poorest women and their families. However, some micro-finance organizations have shied away from providing additional services, afraid they will prove too costly; others have effectively combined savings groups with literacy training, reproductive health, human rights, or HIV/AIDS prevention information sessions. The combination of services allows for leveraging income-generating activities and creating an accessible entry point for women to utilize educational and training opportunities beyond the scope of the micro-enterprise that may not otherwise be available.

Integrated service models utilizing successfully these interrelationships still require greater UN support and increased recognition within the micro-finance community. While expansion of access to an array of micro-finance services is still urgently required, there are continuing debates about the extent to which we should be focusing on grass-roots development activities or macro-level supports and good governance, whether at the local or national level. It sometimes appears that choices are presented in an either/or fashion; however, the reality is that a multi-level, multi-sectoral approach continues to be needed.

In the villages in southern Haiti, women told me recently that access to clean water remains the biggest impediment to economic development, rather than business opportunities per se, and their children may spend several hours per day hauling water from the nearest--unclean--river.

Time is also a precious commodity that prevents many women from focusing more on economic activities, since their household chores take so much longer without easy access to clean water. And even if wells are dug, equitable access to water rights, with profound economic implications, must also be guaranteed for women as well as men at both national and local levels through transparent mechanisms. Land distribution and inheritance, another immensely important mode of asset transfer and one traditionally fraught with gender inequalities, must continue to be reformed worldwide through support from the United Nations and its agencies. Those reforms must be implemented so that women can have some assurance of their own and their children's economic futures.

Focusing on women's economic independence requires a multitude of interventions at the macro and micro levels, creating local access to opportunity, as well as broader equity in access to resources. The United Nations needs to continue to recognize that to attain the Millennium Development Goals pertaining to poverty and gender, broader and deeper access to financial services, combined with other training opportunities at the grass-roots level for the poorest women within appropriately tailored models that allow them to succeed, must continue to be supported. This should also be combined with macro-level measures that reflect the complexities of poverty and the need to work at all levels toward effective solutions.

We still have very much to do.

Richenda Van Leeuwen has been the Executive Director of the Trickle Up Program, based in New York City, for the past two years. She has considerable experience in post-conflict reconstruction, gender development, employment and social services programmes, as well as refugee issues, with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and international and American NGOs.