Project Description:

This project will empower women through the improvement of their living standards. This is expected to impact not only their own lives, but the lives of their immediate family as well.

The intention is to provide beneficiary women with micro-credit aimed at helping them get into farming of groundnuts. This will hopefully provide the beneficiaries with economic empowerment that will lead to well-balanced meals for their families, improved health care, and provision of basic needs for both themselves and their children. The project will be for an initial three year period. Participants will be taught the best practices in groundnut cultivation for high yields. They will also receive training on how to undertake some simple value-added processing activities using the groundnuts they produce. In the first year, each of the 100 beneficiaries will be given the micro-credit facility to enable her to cultivate one acre of groundnuts.

In the second year, the first group of women will be given training in groundnut oil and groundnut cake production while a new group of 100 women will be selected to benefit from the micro-credit facility. In all this, women will also gain some training on how to effectively manage their resources for maximum benefit. This is necessary since resources are always limited.

Update from the field:  December 2009

It is harvest time this November and the women in the Domwine and Eremon in the Lawra District could not be any much more grateful to Uend and the donors behind Uend for the sparkles they have created in their lives. The agricultural year has been good. Two of the main agricultural commodities that women in this project trade in are maize and she nuts. Madam Elizabeth Kpinnuboh seen seated in green dress by her maize retail basket at the Eremon Sunday weekly market says the credit she received from the FoRD-G credit for women sponsored by Uend has enabled her double her turnover in stock from 10 bags (1ton) to 20 bags (2 ton) in four months from August to November 2009, the peak of the harvest period.  

From an initial creditUS$80 to top up her trade capital of US$120, her working capital has grown to US$ 400 and is growing. She has since repaid her loan to enable other benefit in the next round of credit recipients, which in her view should be a minimum of US$100 per recipient. Other people benefiting indirectly from the maize trade are the maize millers positioned right in the Eremon market who are also doing good business from the fast maize trade and good agricultural year. 

The shea fruits, from which the nuts are derived and the butter extracted were in season as usual from April to August 2009. Derypog in Domwine, one of the communities of the Lawra area women credit scheme of FoRD-G women credit project had a head start with a credit of US$ 80, thanks to the efforts of Uend and collaborating donors. Derypog, seen in figure 4. bagging her shea nuts purchased in the Domwine evening market readily buys the small quantities of shea nuts from the aged women on daily basis until she can have a full bag. This constitutes an economic unit to start processing the nuts into butter and timed for the weekly 7-day cycle Lawra market. 

Although Derypog has not yet gotten all her income-expenditure figures right, she is sure life is getting better for her and her family in Domwine. More important for her however is not the profit she is making, but the fact that she represents a ready market for the more disadvantaged aged women who can sell small 1kilo lots of shea nuts in a bowl to have a few coins (pesewas) to purchase salt, pepper and fish for a fairly balanced meal in a day.