Volunteer Experiences – Microfinance Project
Late November / Early December 2009: Lee Ferrier, a JWOC volunteer, spoke to scholarship student Chankakda and accompanied her during her weekly volunteering with the Microfinance project. Here is what he wrote about his experience…
I accompanied Kakda when she went into the community as a project worker in the JWOC micro- finance project. Her duties this day were to meet the loan recipients, collect from them their required weekly payments, and to discuss any problems they were having with their businesses.
Kakda is a scholarship student in her 4th year at university majoring in English literature. She is a 26 year old qualified school teacher who wishes to pursue a career as an English teacher at a private school or university.
It is hard not to be impressed with her dedication and hard work. She is employed as a teacher at two schools from 7.30 am to 6.00 pm and attends her university classes from 6.00 to 9;00 pm, all of this 6 days a week. On Sundays she volunteers at JWOC.
Kakda told us that the project not only provides loans, but also holds workshops to help loan recipients learn good business practices and money management. They also learn to set goals and, in cases of group loans, to solve problems in group discussion.
We were scheduled to visit three recipients, but only needed to visit two, because the other had dropped by the JWOC community center to make her required payment. Her business was selling used clothing at a local market - the loan enabled her to buy clothes for resale.
We visited a "group recipient" - first time borrowers are required to borrow as a group and all must take responsibility to pay off the loan of the group. The loan payment was made without a hitch. The meeting, which included the recording of the payment and providing a receipt record to the borrower, was conducted in a friendly but business-like manner. In this case the borrowers were a husband running a hand laundry business, his wife running a small street-side café, and a neighbor working as a self-employed metal worker, who needed a small loan to pay for gas for his motorbike so he could go to job sites to do his work.
Kakda credits Michèle, the Project Manager, and Andrew and Camilla, the JWOC Directors, for the effective administration of JWOC, and the guidance and assistance they provide to the scholarship student volunteers - all in the pursuit of assisting the community. Kakda says she too is learning about money management, good business practices and the setting of priorities and goals. She plans to continue giving back to her community. After completing University, while pursuing her career as an English teacher, she wants to volunteer in the management of an NGO --- relying on her experience gained at JWOC.
I do not doubt for a moment that she will do it.
Small Loans, Big Impacts
By: Kitt Johnson, JWOC volunteer, February 2009
It’s 2 p.m. on a hot afternoon in Cambodia and I’m bouncing along on the back of a motorcycle on an unpaved back road near the Angkor Wat temple in Cambodia. We are looking for my lost bill collectors. You are thinking, “Ahh… big guys with hairy backs.” Actually, they are JWOC scholarship students who have volunteered to collect the weekly loan repayments from the villagers who have used the JWOC Microfinance program to borrow modest sums (e.g. $100) to finance the growth of their micro businesses. I’m here to see what it’s all about.
After getting lost twice, we see my two collectors standing patiently in the sun beside their motorcycle on the outskirts of a village of “squatters”. This is a cluster of about two hundred hastily assembled huts on currently unused government land. The residents are at the bottom of the economic heap in Cambodia … which means they are pretty far down by anybody’s reckoning. As part of my opportunity to see “the other Cambodia, the one beyond the tourist buses and hotels”, I have been sent to watch JWOC teams in action.
JWOC scholarship recipients are given the opportunity to participate in a variety of JWOC Community Service Programs. One of these is JWOC’s microfinance outreach program which provides small loans (which might range from $50-150) to the economically disadvantaged . The students help by identifying potential applicants, reviewing the applications to determine which requests look most promising of successfully achieving the goal of the loan, collecting the weekly payments and doing all the bookkeeping required to make the system work.
The participating volunteer students are grouped into 2 person teams. Groups of students interview the applicants and decide which business plans to support. They then visit the recipients weekly to collect the weekly payment and thus follow the progress the little businesses. While they might make a “commonsense” suggestion, they do not attempt to manage the clients’ businesses. The goal is to make loans to people who seem to have good idea of what to do with the loan and how to make money from the investment.
Today’s collection visit was to a typical rural village hut whose occupants operate a small stand selling cooked noodles at the entrance to Angkor Wat. As the young man and woman sat talking with the loan recipient, a 40 year old woman who was assisted in her business by her 18 year old daughter, my translator repeated the discussion as well as he could. It seems that in addition to the $150 the woman borrowed to expand her business, she also has responsibility for collecting the weekly payment from 3 other village families that each have borrowed $100 to support their projects.
The woman was explaining that business was poor and it was hard to make this week’s payment. The JWOC team reminded her that she had never missed a payment and that she had a wonderful record which would enable her to apply for future and larger loans. The woman thought that maybe she did have the money and sent her daughter to collect payments from the other people from the village who had also taken microloans.
When smiles and money were exchanged, and everyone had congratulated each other, the JWOC team climbed on their motorcycle and we followed them back to the JWOC offices where a large meeting of students was underway. This team needed to count their daily collections and prepare the reports that provided a structure for this small loan program. This is done under the eagle watch of their colleagues … who don’t want any shortages co-mingled with their weekly proceeds.
At the moment JWOC has approximately 50 loans outstanding and approximately 90% of the loans could be considered “reasonably” current. (On the edge of poverty, sometimes you fall a week behind.) After the group reconciled their numbers amid much waving of hand calculators, they deposited the funds and forms. One of the JWOC students who plans on a possible career in tourism leaned over and mentioned that this would be much easier with an Excel spreadsheet but their aren’t enough computers available to make that SOP. She went on to explain to me some of the intricacies of the Microfinance program (“…now this group has 5 loans that have fallen behind; you know, sometimes the applicants lie to us. The team needs to do better next time when they choose their loans.”) She was determined that they would all be more vigilant in screening loans in the coming round because they did not want to give the money to people who could not realistically expect to pay it back. But if they don’t find people who can use the money wisely, then no one gets richer.
As I headed back to my dinner, tourist bus and hotel, I thought about the impact of this JWOC program. Not only was JWOC helping the poor at the local level … well below that which banks could normally address; but the volunteers participating in the program were getting an “up close and personal” lesson in the realities of business life, be it the details of bookkeeping, the uncertainties of predicting the future or the nature of people ... sometimes they do lie to you. But you don’t stop doing business, you just try to better spot the parts that aren’t rights and decide how to deal with them.
Meet a few of our borrowers and find out about their businesses and how JWOC is supporting them…
Find out the answers to our Microfinance programme most frequently asked questions…
