Ordinary Touch Volunteers

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By Eva Ambani

 

 “Rose Okumu, a widow, lives in one the poorest villages in Kenya. Since childhood, she has known about a terrible disease called malaria, but she and her neighbors did not know how it was spread, how to protect themselves, when it would strike, and what kind of medicine would help. Malaria, a ruthless killer, swept through her village repeatedly, stealing the lives of countless children. Rose feared for her children, but she had no idea how to protect them. She obtained a microloan along with information about nutrition and malaria from Ordinary Touch Volunteers. She used the loan to buy nuts and potatoes to sell. She increased her income enough to buy medicine, insecticide-treated mosquito nets, and nutritious food for her children. Her children no longer fall sick as often as they used to”. Says Mr. Geofrey Oduor, OTV’s Program Manager.

 

These kinds of accounts are very common and easily found in books and technical reports on microcredit as well as the web pages of microcredit organizations such as Grameen Bank, ACCION, FINCA (Foundation for International Community Assistance), and PRIDE (Promotion of Rural Initiatives and Development Enterprises). 

 

In recent years, microcredit has dominated popular attention, especially among practitioners and scholars who are interested in ways to improve the economic and social conditions of the “third world”. However, much of the literature on microcredit comes from advocates who are hastily enthusiastic about its potential to reduce poverty, mitigate gender inequities and improve the overall healthiness of impoverished communities in poor countries. As such, a great deal of the literature on microcredit is promotional. Many are anecdotal stories of individual women and men working to build opportunities to empower and enrich themselves despite difficult circumstances and meager resources. This has led to an injudicious bias about microcredit’s power to correct social ills associated with poverty and about its ability to permanently abate the strangleholds of pauperism.

 

 

Ordinary Touch Volunteers (OTV as it is popularly known), saw that lack of capital was keeping poor rural farmers poor. Traditional loans are too restrictive and too expensive, and without collateral, the peasant farmers and small traders couldn’t borrow. So they came up with an idea; if the members formed groups to share a loan and guarantee repayment, they access the funds they needed to invest in their farming and small business operations. And so, Village Banking was born. The members make deposits (also called shares), and can borrow up 3-4 times their share amount without collateral.

 

The "Village Bank" allows those with scarce resources to borrow, invest and grow their businesses. They also allow women—who were routinely denied credit—to build enterprises that kept food on their tables and their children in school. Individuals borrow working capital for their microenterprises, and the group guarantees those loans.