Single Moms in Guyana

Business loans for single mums in Guyana

By Neil Marks Business reporter, Geogetown, Guyana

Petrina now has 50 children in her care each weekday :

                       

Stephane Rutherford has expanded her food business with the help of a Wow loan :

                   

The Women of Worth (Wow) initiative, a 2010 tie-up between the Guyanese government

and the Guyana Bank for Trade and Industry (GBTI), a local commercial lender,

offers microfinance to single mums to start small businesses.

The women are not required to put forward any collateral as a guarantee.

So far 1,400 women have accessed the Wow loans :

which are open to those aged between 18 and 60.

They currently have an interest rate of 6%, are are repaid over a two-year period.

Participants range from unmarried teenage mums, to divorcees, widows and women

who have escaped domestic abuse.


Jennifer Webster, Guyana's minister of human services and social security, says the scheme

is helping the women to make an increased contribution to their local communities.

Stephane Rutherford, 40, has used loans from Wow to extend her small fruit juice cafe,

based in the town of Mahaicony, on Guyana's eastern coast.

Thanks to an initial loan of 104,000 Guyanese dollars she was able to buy in more fruit

from local producers and increase production.


Earnings helped her pay for her two sons' educations. Her youngest is in high school,

where you have to pay exam fees, and her oldest has just completed two years of a

degree in business management.

Petrina Chandra, 39, used a Wow loan to rent an apartment in the capital Georgetown

and convert it into a children's day care centre for two and three-year-olds.

She now has two employees and 50 children under her care.

As the business continues to grow, Ms Chandra has more money for herself and her family.


Ms Chandra describes securing the Wow funding as "God's set up for me". 

Yet despite the successes of the Wow loans, there have been some problems:

admits Shaleeza Shaw, head of credit at GBTI.

In the first year of the scheme there was a repayment rate of 95%, but that dipped to 70%

in the second year, and it continues to go down. Ms Shaw says there were a number of reasons

for the fall, such as women having to compete for business in the same small marketplace as

others who have taken out Wow loans.

In other cases, some single mothers have to divert Wow loans for other uses, such as paying medical bills if a child becomes sick.

But that has not brought the scheme to its knees.

"We are not daunted by those seeming pitfalls,"  says Ms Shaw.