Widows' micro-financing project going strong

With no network of local banks offering loans to families and small businesses, more than 150 widows living to the west of the northern Iraqi Kurdish city of Sulaymaniyah have turned in recent months to a humanitarian-sponsored micro-finance scheme. The brainchild of staff at the Kurdistan Economic Development Organisation (KEDO), a local NGO based in the city, the project began in November 2002 with a grant from a Dutch consortium. Heavily affected by the Anfal military campaigns of 1987 and 1988 in which tens of thousands of Kurds, mainly men, were killed by the former regime of Saddam Hussein, the Baziyan and Chamchamal districts have always attracted much humanitarian attention. KEDO's first projects in the region involved distributing livestock to women reduced to extreme poverty by the loss of their husbands. "Our aim with the micro-finance scheme was to go a step further, to give individual women more choice and more responsibility," KEDO project manager Sozan Adnan told IRIN in Sulaymaniyah. "That way, the project was more likely to outlive our direct involvement." The principle is very simple. Fifteen widows, chosen on the basis of their poverty and lack of male relatives to support them, were selected as "team leaders" and given training in basic money management. They were then given a safe box with around US $300 worth of Iraqi dinars in it, and responsibility for 10 to 12 other widows. "Any woman who wants a loan comes to me," Baziyan team leader Dulber Said, a mother of three daughters whose husband was killed in 1987, told IRIN. "We discuss her plans together, and then with the other nine women in our group. If everybody agrees, she gets money." The original plan was for the borrower to pay back 10 percent of her loan every month. In Baziyan at least, repayments have since been halved. "Many women were having difficulty with 10 percent," explained Said. Of the 12 participants in Bayinjan, most chose to take out loans to buy livestock. Others bought wheelbarrows to enable their sons to hawk goods in the local bazaar. One woman, though, chose to buy a kerosene heater. She has since been taken off the scheme. "Loans are supposed to be used to invest in something with a return," said Bayinjan widow Khanim Rasul, "not to buy household goods." Rasul herself has used the safe box twice, first to buy two goats (now four), and later wool to be knitted into leg warmers and the loose-knit wool squares Kurds use to scrub themselves with in the shower. With a severely handicapped daughter to care for, Rasul told IRIN her knitting was almost enough to sustain her. She buys a kilo of wool for around US $0.60 and sells her goods for 15 times as much in the local market. "The only trouble is," she added with a grin, "the quality is so good that these things take ages to fall apart. So demand is low." For Dulber Said, though, the finance scheme goes well beyond its original aim. "Thanks to this," she said, tapping her grey strong box, "I have a whole network of friends I would not otherwise have met." But both women share the same dream: to be able to return to the villages they were evicted from in the late 1980s. "Others from the village have returned, but my house was destroyed", complained Rasul. "Even a year's solid knitting wouldn't be enough to pay the cost of labourers," she added.