Women pounding millet in Kalbiron, in eastern Senegal. Photo by Brett Eloff/Oxfam America.

Eastern Senegal is hot and dusty in May. The wind swirls into spiraling dust devils, stirring up the dirt and dead leaves, whirling drunkenly through the bush before disappearing up into the clear, cloudless blue sky. The inescapable heat feels like opening up a hot oven, when the heat blasts into your face. Except it’s like that all day, and you can’t ever close the oven door.

In Tambacounda, at a small village called Kalbiron, farmers are nervously awaiting the rains, preparing their fields, and thinking about the growing season. After they amass their savings, borrow money, and plant the seeds they saved from the last harvest, few will have much left over to get them through the growing months. Read the rest of this entry »

In the Segou region of Mali, 82 percent of households polled in a recent survey live on less than $1.25 a day. The typical village is more than 14 miles from a paved road. As a result, few people have access to resources that many of us take for granted—like a place to save and borrow money, for example.

Enter Saving for Change, an innovative program from Oxfam America, Freedom from Hunger, and the Strømme Foundation. Focusing on rural villages like those in Segou, the program trains groups of women to save regularly; they borrow from their group’s fund to build small businesses or homes, or to buy essentials for their families. Members then repay loans from the group with interest. The model has taken off, and Saving for Change now has 680,000 members in 13 countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. (Read what members in Guatemala and in Senegal are saying about their experiences.)

Women from the Banakoro village Saving for Change group in Mali hand in their weekly savings contributions during a meeting in 2009. Photo: Rebecca Blackwell/Oxfam America

In Mali, where some of the first Saving for Change groups were founded, Oxfam and Freedom From Hunger conducted a three-year study exploring the impacts of the program. The results of the study, released last Friday, show that households in villages with savings groups experienced an 8 percent increase in food security and saved 31 percent more on average.

The groups helped in other ways, too. The study showed that the value of livestock held by households in participating villages increased by 13 percent compared to families in villages without the program. “Livestock are a critical safety net for families. The animals are a form of savings that can be sold in hard times. Imagine if your home value or stock portfolio increased by 13 percent—it could be game-changing for your family,” said Freedom from Hunger President Steve Hollingworth.

Learn more about Saving for Change and the results of the study here.

Larry Fitzgerald (white shirt) and Anquan Boldin (right) help women artisanal miners pound rock and sand. Photo by Audra Melton/Oxfam America

The village of Sabodala in eastern Senegal is going through an amazingly difficult transition.  Until several years ago the community had access to land on which they farmed for generations. They had clean water whenever needed.  The land provided a means of livelihood for the community while villagers turned to artisanal mining for gold in the dry season to earn extra money.

Then a mining company came in and seized their land—and everything changed. People could no longer farm in the same places. They still had access to water through a pump the mining company was generous enough to build in the village – but not generous enough to let the community use for free.  Villagers say that sometimes the pump was shut off for days at a time.  Farmers in Sabodala  were forced to depend on artisanal mining for basic necessities in a way they never had to before.  Seemingly overnight, mining changed from a way to generate supplemental income to the only way to earn a living year-round.

I stepped into this situation with NFL wide receivers Anquan Boldin, Larry Fitzgerald, and Roddy White on a visit with Oxfam to learn about our programs in the region and what they, their fans, and you can do to support our friends and partners on the ground.

The players saw one of the ways the community of Sabodala has responded to their newly created situation: the creation of a women’s Saving for Change group by a local association that was also working with Oxfam to help farmers get compensation for their lost land and improve access to water. Each individual member of the group saves and deposits about 25 cents a week (roughly $12 each year) to the group fund. That seemed like a small amount to the players and myself, but when combined with the entire group savings, is actually a good sum of money to save in eastern Senegal.  The members can then borrow small loans to meet emergency needs or fund a small business venture.  The group has given the women access to resources they desperately need.

Changing for the better

We spoke with women who say their lives have been changed for the better through creating and accessing the savings group.  It is helping them open up new businesses, money for health care for children in the community, and getting new clothes. Although a savings group won’t solve all the problems in Sabodala, it will help people survive some difficult changes.

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Over the past few years I have visited a lot of communities affected by large-scale mining projects. In Honduras, Mali, Peru, Ghana, Guatemala, Cambodia, or Senegal, I usually hear about more or less the same problems: loss of land, loss of jobs, pollution, and despair.

No matter how much you hear about these problems, seeing them in the small towns, villages, and in the homes of people remembering a lost way of life is always shocking. I was reminded of this most recently in a small village called Faloumbou, in the far eastern border of Senegal. The entire village of 650 people, including all 35 of its farming families, had lost all the agricultural land they had used to grow millet, maize, and ground nuts. The government gave it to an Australian mining company. All their fields are now part of an open-pit gold mine. No one in Faloumbou had received any sort of compensation for lost land.

The chief of the village, Kourou Keita, asks a simple question: “We don’t know anything but farming, so if you take the land from us, how can we survive?”

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Photo: Zeenat Potia / Oxfam America

My initial impression of the village of Sirakoro, Mali, was an explosion of color. The women were dressed in bold prints, often with twirled head scarves, and yet their dazzling outfits contrasted sharply with the mud brown backdrop of their village. On the surface level, to my untrained eye, the poverty in Mali was different from the stark, in-your-face urban poverty that I grew up around in Mumbai, India. Here the struggles seemed subtle to a visitor, but were equally if not harsher. No running water or electricity, scarcity of food, and lack of adequate schools—to name a few.

I traveled to Mali recently to attend a conference on Saving for Change, Oxfam’s innovative microfinance program that empowers women through small, rural, community-based autonomous savings and lending groups. Saving for Change is now reaching 300,000 women, in almost half of the 10,000 villages in Mali. We went to six different remote villages and had the opportunity to see the savings groups conduct their meetings, and to talk with individual members about their experiences.

Despite President Obama’s assertion last week in his speech during the Millennium Development Goals Summit that the delivery of medicines to Mali is improving the health systems there, the UNDP statistics on Mali continue to be humbling. The overall illiteracy rate is 73.8 percent, with women faring much worse, and the average life expectancy is 48.1 years.

Yet, here we were witnessing change in difficult circumstances. The savings groups are comprised of about twenty women, and they sit around a circle conducting their business orally, often repeating the amount that each woman contributes, since no written records exist.

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As a writer, I’m the biggest word fan there is–but I also appreciate the power of photography as a means for making an instant emotional connection. Beginning with the stunning Rankin photos from the Democractic Republic of the Congo that we highlighted in the January 2009 issue of our magazine, OXFAMExchange, it seemed like photography really came to the forefront this year, especially as a way to tell stories about the people behind our work. On that note, here are a few (very subjective) picks for my favorite Oxfam images from the year.

Loko Dadacha photo by Eva-Lotta Jansson / Oxfam America

Many unforgettable images come to mind when I think of my trip to Ethiopia earlier this year, but I especially like this portrait of Loko Dadacha, one of the most extraordinary people I met during my visit. You can really sense the great strength–physical and emotional–of this widow and mother of six from Gutu Dobi, Ethiopia, who is helping to lead her community during a time of ongoing drought.

Saving circle, Mali. Photo by Rebecca Blackwell / Oxfam America

Women from the Banakoro, Mali, village Saving for Change group–dubbed Sabougnuma, or “good deed”–hold their weekly meeting. I like how this colorful photo really captures the community spirit of the savings groups, where women work together to help each other save money and start small businesses.

Read the rest of this entry »

Leaders of a Saving for Change group in Zantiebougou-Fala, Mali, keep track of deposits at a group meeting. Photo by Rebecca Blackwell/Oxfam America

Interesting news: we just heard that our Saving for Change program has broken the 250,000 participant barrier. According to the message we just got from our VP John Ambler, Saving for Change now has “more than 250,000 members, and operates in more than 6,000 villages on three continents.” This makes Saving for Change one of Oxfam America’s largest non-humanitarian programs.

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We’ve been looking at the photos we got from Senegal-based photographer Rebecca Blackwell from a trip in March in Mali to visit several Saving for Change groups in the southern part of the country near Bougouni. I want to share a few of Rebecca’s portraits and some quotes from the women we met, just because I have been thinking about them lately. I detected a common theme in each village and group: dignity. The women described how saving and borrowing money from their group helped them manage their affairs independently. You can see pride in their faces, and hear it in their words.

Soumba Doumbia. Photo by Rebecca Blackwell/Oxfam America

Soumba Doumbia, mid 30s, three children, sells cloth and clothing to earn extra money.

“Before we established our group, we had no hope. If we had problems and needed money, we had to go to a nearby town and borrow it. We would ask people here for help, but they did not always say yes. Now we can find money for our problems from the group.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Fanta Niambaly, president of the Saving for Change group in Banakoro, in southern Mali. Photo by Chris Hufstader/Oxfam America.

I just spent two days visiting Saving for Change groups in southern Mali. Saving for Change teaches women to save money and start small business ventures.

The women always have a look in their eyes that conveys real dignity and just a bit of fire as they describe their businesses, and how the money they earn is helping their families. Most can say their children have decent clothes and are in school, the family is eating better, and they are saving money.

Fanta Niambaly, 52, is president of one Saving for Change group in the village of Banakoro. She says the 29 women in her group are changing the way they see themselves and their place in the community. “We are proud of our businesses, and we are learning to become entrepreneurs,” she says, squinting in the sun.

In other villages women say they are now included in village councils and help make decisions on important matters like the maintenance of wells and new pumps. But are women sharing any decision-making power beyond their traditional roles of carrying water and caring for children? Do their husbands respect their opinions in family and village matters? Can they own property, be the mayor, or carry out other official duties? Read the rest of this entry »

With 2008 behind us, we’re highlighting photos we think best capture Oxfam’s work last year. Here’s a photo of one of my favorite people. More to come from others.

My boss, Jane, has a saying. She wants the writers to “narrow the distance” between the poor people we work with and our readers here in The States. So, when each of us heads out into the field, we keep this mission in mind, filling our notebooks with the voices of the people we meet and the stories they have to tell.

Every year, a few people’s stories stand out. Sometimes it’s because of the sheer adversity they face. Other times, it’s the great success they’ve seen and the simplicity of the solutions they pursued. The woman I’m thinking of falls into the latter category. Her name is Seng Sreila, and I have visited her home twice in two years. She’s a rice farmer in Cambodia who took out a series of small loans from her village savings group to start her own business. With that money, she’s milling rice for other farmers in her village. Her success has become well-known in her community, and her status, that of a local celebrity.

The first time I met her, Sreila gave us the kind of welcome that’s typical of the people we meet during our travels. She was kind of shy, but had this beautiful smile that popped up whenever she was nervous. After just a few hours of talking, she treated us like good friends. When we were gathering our things to leave, she grabbed my arm in a familiar way, and walked me back to our car. As she thanked me for coming, she held my hands. I remember how hers felt; they were small, like mine.

Seng Sreila in June 2008 showing off her rice mill. Photo by Inazio.

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