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PAKISTAN: Small Loans Pull Women Out of Poverty Trap

Zofeen T. Ebrahim

KARACHI, Dec 5 2005 (IPS) - A small loan of 8,000 rupees, about 160 dollars, has enabled 35-year-old seamstress Laila to expand her business and escape the glass ceiling of rural Pakistan’s patriarchal culture.

Although they live in a village deep in the interior of Sindh province, 225 km from the port city of Karachi, her family has bought a refrigerator, TV, computer, dining set, electric fans and furniture with her earnings. “Earlier we had nothing. Even providing three meals a day was not easy,” she says.

Now Laila is the decision-maker in her family and village. Over the last two years she has helped form eight new self-help groups of up to eight women each in her village, Bhit Shah.

Her husband’s earnings go to pay for the installments on two small plots of land the family recently bought. He “often calls me the big boss,” she admits laughingly. Says Hura, her 22-year-old daughter: “I’d never see my mother smile so much and so often.”

The mammoth changes in her life were brought about by the Sindh Agricultural and Forestry Workers Coordinating Organisation (Safwco). In 2004, she joined the ranks of some 6,500 people who have taken loans in four sub-districts of Sanghar under its microfinance programme. Between 2001 and 2004, Safwco was a partner in the Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund, an umbrella group sponsored by the Pakistan government and funded by the World Bank.

A vast majority of Pakistan’s people are poor. According to the Asian Development Bank, an estimated 32.1 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. Two-thirds of the country’s 162 million people live in the villages. Only a fraction have access to the small loans of microfinance programmes.

What Pakistan needs is a “pro-poor macroeconomic policy”, says Kaiser Bengali, of the Social Policy Development Centre here. Microcredit, he argues, is no panacea for poverty. The United Nations has designated 2005 the International Year of Microcredit.

“While it is always good to see someone who has benefited from a programme, microfinance can be an added tool to deal with poverty,” he says. “Poverty reduction is a collective issue, and benefiting a few individuals is not a substitute for dealing with mass poverty.”

According to Bengali, provision of education, adequate health services and appropriate infrastructure support – services which are the responsibility of the state – have to be included in the fight against poverty.

Political economist Asad Sayeed advises that if money for microfinance were channeled into public works “it would be a better way to do it”.

Microfinance may not be the perfect cure for poverty, but it has provided much-needed insight into the lives of the poor.

It has proved without doubt that the poor are capable of saving, maybe not in the conventional manner, as their investments are in the form of purchased assets, such as gold jewelry, livestock and land. Their idea of saving is to be able to get ready cash in times of emergency.

Access to small loans has made the dips and peaks of poverty less pronounced by giving the poor the opportunity to start businesses, pay for school fees, procure housing or receive health care. It is also seen as a direct way to tackle Millennium Development Goal 1, fighting poverty and hunger, and Goal 3, promoting gender equality and empowering women.

The eight MDGs were established by the UN General Assembly in 2000, with the main goal being to halve the proportion of the world’s population living on less than one dollar a day by 2015.

To the few who have been able to avail themselves of microfinance, it has given them an opportunity and choice. These small loans have meant a difference between everyday fights for survival and going to sleep at night with a full stomach.

For people like Dungar Mal, one of the best cobblers in the town of Shahdadpur, and who lost everything in the four years that he was sick, it was an opportunity to start again.

Because the poor cannot access traditional formal financial institutions, a majority of them depend upon the informal credit market for which they pay very high interest rates. Thanks to microfinance opportunities, the dependency of the poor on other expensive sources of credit has been reduced.

Take Bashiran, for example, who buys second-hand clothing from Karachi and repairs, alters and then sells them in small towns and villages in Sindh. She says she “is alive again”. She says the worry lines on her face “have all but vanished” as she has finally got rid of the “burly Pathan” money lenders who were forever knocking on her door.

Her profits have quadrupled and all her children are going to school. And, she adds proudly, now when her guests want to use the toilet, she can take them to her newly constructed latrine “that does not stink.”

Another happy story is that of Sakina Bughio. She sells milk from the six buffaloes and one cow she has taken on hire. The profits have enabled her to buy the three calves that were born from her hired livestock. “I’ll feed them for four to five years before they start giving milk. And in between if there is an emergency, God forbid, I know I can always sell one of these as they are mine.”

In Pakistan, like elsewhere, microfinance has shattered the myth that the poor do not repay their debts. In fact, they pay up the high interest rates to assure long-term access to credit. The alternative – an even higher interest rate from the informal finance sector or money lenders, or outright refusal by the commercial banks – is far less attractive.

The small loans have transformed lives beyond expectations.

Sakina has been twice elected the local councilor and Sanhul, who earned a livelihood making patchwork quilts, has bought a cow with the loan from Safwco.