What’s New with Naomi and Kaisi Village
As a village team member of Kaisi village, we invite you to check back often to follow the successes and challenges of Naomi and other members of the Kaisi village as they begin to work with CARE through the Join My Village program. Here’s what’s happening now:
April/May, 2010
April and May have brought many reasons for celebration for the Join My Village communities in Kasungu. The tobacco and maize harvests have been good, there is once again enough food for everyone and the local markets are bustling with new business. Similar to the crops that were planted many months ago and have finally yielded valuable results, the seeds of change planted by the Join My Village program are also starting to bear fruit in a multitude of ways.
With the distribution of 160 girls’ secondary school scholarships, children are studying harder in anticipation of securing their own scholarship in the future. According to Lufina James, member of one of the Village Savings & Loan Association (VSLA) groups in Nguluwe, “Students are more eager to go to class. Parents who were not that keen on school are now keen.” All of this excitement is only heightened by the new construction of teachers’ houses across several of the villages. Communities know that a new teacher’s house guarantees at least one new instructor for their local school – a much needed resource when some teachers are currently instructing over one hundred children per class.
People are finally seeing the results of their committed saving through the VSLA groups and new businesses are popping up across the villages. Katrina Mwale, mzati in Tembwe village, said that evidence of the diligence of VSLA groups who stuck out the lean months is everywhere. “There are so many businesses – samosas (fried pastries filled with meat or vegetables), beer, doughnuts, sugar cane and others too. It's because of Join My Village.”
To celebrate the amazing changes taking place in the Join My Village communities, we brought all ten mzatis together in Kasungu to share their stories of challenge and success, learn from each other and celebrate all they have worked so hard to accomplish this first year of the program. Margret Banda, 8th grader and mzati of Katukula village, probably put it best when she commented on her first trip to Kasungu, “If I have been to Kasungu, I know I can do anything.”
Through this first year of Join My Village, we have indeed seen that anything and everything is possible – and we have only just begun.
Updates from Kaisi Village
- In April Naomi's Chiyanjano (Chichewa for “fellowship”) Village Savings & Loan Association (VSLA) group harvested their group plot of maize and turned a profit of 47,500 Kwacha ($317). Following the example of Join My Village, they used some of the profit to pay school fees for one needy student in Kaisi. The rest will be reinvested for the group.
- As VSLA businesses took off in Kaisi with the spring harvest, people began to come to Naomi asking her to help them start their own groups. She and another VSLA member are now training nine new groups in Kaisi.
- All of Kaisi pitched in to build a new female teacher's house with supplies from Join My Village. Women carried water and sand. Men mixed cement and ferried bricks to the building site. By the end of April the foundation had been set, door and window frames were in place and walls were rising rapidly.
February/March, 2010
Villages in Kasungu are feeding their guests again. In Malawi, if a village can feed visitors, it does. So, when the plates of nsima and greens with beans and drumsticks stopped this December, we knew it was likely people in the villages were not eating themselves. But, on visits in February and March, villages were once again welcoming guests with local treats. The signs that things are getting better are everywhere. Riverbeds that were dry have filled to bursting. The maize is ripe in the fields. Nutritious pumpkins and squash crowd at the stalks of the tobacco plants. Tobacco hangs to dry in every available shelter: from the ceilings of clinics, classrooms and is strung from the thatch of bedrooms. Though tobacco auctions haven't opened, it can be sold locally to buy small necessities like salt, soap and beans, and there is paying work to be found picking and stitching and drying the leaves. As the cash begins to flow, the small businesses set up by VSLA members are prospering. The members themselves are investing more.
Across Kasungu, communities continue to increase their trust in the Join My Village team. One reason is that the VSLA groups are starting to see results – their savings have grown and their businesses are bringing in new money. Another is that over 110 girls' high school scholarships were distributed in January and February.
The scholarships had a far greater impact than anyone at Join My Village had anticipated. Primary schools saw scores of girls returning to class. Many had not seen the point of finishing primary school, which is free in Malawi, when they knew that their families could not pay for high school.
Hope has indeed returned to the Join My Village communities, and the seeds of change that have been planted over the past nine months are growing strong roots for a promising future.
- Girls Education
- 113 secondary school scholarships distributed to girls across all of the villages (4 of the girls are from Kaisi village)
- 15 group village schools have received new reference materials, including English Dictionaries, English Grammar books, World Maps and Blackboard Rulers
- 8 new female teachers’ houses have been planned and materials secured, with a planned completion of June
- Village Savings and Loan Association Groups
- 55 Village Savings & Loans Association Groups have saved a total of $4,707 (over 700,000 Kwacha)!
- This averages out to $6 per person, which is nearly 5% of the average Malawian’s annual income of $160
- In Kaisi, there are five groups with a total of 52 members and savings to date of $680
Updates from Kaisi Village
- Naomi says that Join My Village is becoming famous around the Kasungu region. “I take myself as a part of CARE,” she says. “We can sing about Join My Village in Kaisi. Last time I was in another town for a workshop I heard people there singing about Join My Village.”
- The School Management Committee at Chaluwo Primary School thinks there may be more girls accepted to Secondary School in the future now that the Join My Village scholarships are available. “We are campaigning for more girls to go to school because now there is a donor who can support the girls,” says Sossten Phiri, vice chairman of the committee. “There is no excuse now not to send girls to school.”
- During school holidays in March, Naomi noticed a change. “Most girls were attending holiday classes and that is not usually the case,” Naomi says. “Every girl is saying that this examination she will do better.”
- Amina Phiri is one of the girls in Kaisi whose parents could not afford to send her to secondary school. “I was depressed,” Amina says. She didn’t give up. “My thinking was that I would repeat eighth grade so that maybe there would be school fees next year.” Then Amina found out that she’d been chosen for a scholarship. “I felt so good and excited,” she says. “I am so eager to learn.” Amina has some advice for other girls in Kaisi who want to win scholarships. “They need to work extra hard so that they may get selected to go to high school,” she says. “They must not be childish and they should study hard, even in primary school.”
- As the rainy season drew to a close, Kaisi's VSLAs were expanding. Naomi's Chiyanjano (“fellowship”) VSLA decided to wait to start individual businesses because they worried that people in Kaisi would not be able to buy anything during the lean season. Instead they invested 20,000 Kwacha to plant an acre with corn. “We will have a bumper harvest from the group field, Naomi says. In fact the plot has been so bountiful that the group will have surplus corn to help the needy. “We are assured we will make profit. We will sell some of the maize (corn) and share the money and keep some for orphans, the old and the needy.”
January, 2010
- Naomi's Chiyanjano (Chichewa for “fellowship”) VSLA has doubled its savings to 20,000 Kwacha ($139).
- By December, Naomi had saved 2,500 Kwacha ($17) but she says everyone in the group has been able to save less of late. “We are still buying shares but not as before,” she says. “Money is on demand for school fees, seeds and fertilizer right now.” The group has now dropped its share price from 100 Kwacha ($0.70) to 50 ($0.35) so that everyone can afford at least one share each week.
- In November Naomi’s children, Caroline and Gerald, learned that they had passed their exams with high marks. On the first Monday in December, Caroline began the third grade and Gerald started the second.
- Naomi already sees some changes in Kaisi this hungry season. VSLA members are busier than before, looking for odd jobs to raise money to save with their groups. “Join My Village is here and people are busier now, looking for piecework, saying, let us do something to raise our funds,” she says. Each step that groups make towards starting businesses to supplement their farm work will make them less vulnerable to unpredictable harvests and erratic weather patterns. If Kaisi's groups continue as they have, they may decide to call next year's hungry season by another name.
- Naomi invited two of her sisters to come for Christmas. “We went to mass and then we came home and prepared our chicken and our rice,” she says. “We prepared wine and went to watch the Gule Wankulu (a traditional dance in Malawi).” Chicken, rice and masese (traditional wine made from fermented maize flour) are rare delicacies in rural Kasungu during ordinary days but common during festival seasons.
December, 2009
The hungry season, which lasts from December until February or March, is a precarious time for people in Kasungu's villages. In years like this one, when the last harvest was scant, grain stores are exhausted by December and new crops will not be ready until March, or sometimes later. All too often, simply focusing on survival trumps plans for the future. Because so many people rely solely upon agriculture, crucial things like education, a roof to keep the rain out and good health – a mother's best intentions – are subject to the whimsy of annual weather systems.
This is exactly the vicious cycle that Join My Village was designed to help break. By introducing the Village Savings and Loan Association (VSLA) model, villagers (in particular women) have a new opportunity to diversify their incomes by learning how to save their money, earn interest, borrow from their groups and start new businesses that do not rely solely on farming. By enabling women to earn an income for their families, and have a new-found voice in the household’s financial decisions, history has shown that more children, especially girls, have the opportunity to complete their primary educations and often continue onto secondary school. Coupled with the secondary school scholarships to be funded through Join My Village, the program provides a powerful one-two punch to loosen the grip that the “hungry season” has traditionally had on these villages.
Tufwe Mwafulirwa, a veteran VSLA trainer with CARE, has seen groups in rural Malawi grow their savings from nothing to as much as 600,000 Kwacha ($4,166.67) as women establish durable businesses. “This is the peak period in Malawi when money is in the field,” Tufwe says. “But it will pick up (referring to VSLA activities). By May you will really start to see a result.”
November, 2009
- The village of Kaisi has formed seven village savings and loan groups, and is ready to start making loans with their new training from CARE.
- Naomi started a village savings and loan with nine other experienced businesswomen. They have named their group Chiyanjano, meaning “fellowship” in Chichewa. “It's because we have good fellowship,” Naomi says. “We have so much in common. We know our problems. We know what we are and we enjoy each other.”
- Naomi’s village savings and loan group has already saved 10,000 Kwacha (U.S. $70).
- Naomi tries to invest 100 Kwacha (U.S. $.70) each time they meet, and so far she has saved 1,000 Kwacha (U.S. $7).
- Naomi has spent more and more time volunteering in Kaisi. Perhaps too much. The mothers' group she leads has gotten another 80 primary school dropouts to return to school since July, but Naomi’s house has begun to cave in. In September, she built a smaller house with a thatch roof to live in until she can afford to repair the home she loves.
October, 2009
- Since helping found the Fawema Women's Group in December of 2008 to raise awareness about gender based violence and keeping Kaisi’s girls in school, Naomi has enabled more than 30 students to return back to school. It's not easy – most families don't have phones so Naomi must trek many kilometers through the 27 villages that feed into Kaisi's primary school to convince families it's more important to have children in school than married or working in the fields. Naomi says most of the drop-outs are girls. Three had left the eighth grade to have babies. Their return to class, which might seem a small individual achievement to Americans, represents a truly courageous step towards breaking down a longstanding taboo about mothers in school in rural Malawi.
- For years, Naomi has supplemented her farming by bringing used clothing from Malawi's capital, Lilongwe, to sell in the market in Kasungu. When her husband died a few years ago, the business became an essential source of income to keep her kids fed and in school. But, during last year's rainy season, Naomi's house collapsed and she was forced to use the money for her business to keep a roof over her family. She is hoping to use the VSLA money to get her business up and running again.
- In addition to her two youngest children Naomi is supporting two orphaned teenage girls who are in boarding school. She says money goes quickly with growing girls – there are snacks to buy and clothing and cosmetics too. But it's important to her that they get an education. “We women must be used to doing things in our own ways,” Naomi says. “We have been led by men through all of our families. Even our mothers and our grandmothers have been headed by men for a long time. Its time we started doing our own things.”
- Several residents of Kaisi have university degrees, including one who went to Cambridge and returned to help build a railway line to Zambia. There is also a doctor and an accountant. No women from Kaisi have graduated from college... yet.
September, 2009
- CARE introduced the village savings & loan association (VSLA) program to the members of Kaisi village in late July. Village members, like Naomi, see the VSLA program as a way to save and borrow money so they can start businesses, enabling them to increase their household income. With the increased income, Naomi knows her daughters will have a greater opportunity to stay in school.
- Naomi is a strong voice in the Kaisi village for why girls should stay in school and get their diplomas. Naomi hopes to continue to be a leader in keeping girls in school, and is interested in joining the VSLA program so she can be a role model for the village.
