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Major donor David Morawetz and his partner Jan Pentland.
Women are able to borrow money from the savings and loan cooperative to repair fishing nets and boats and improve their fishing businesses. Some women dry small fish, prawns and crabs on the ground in the sun and later sell them.
A passage to India
Does overseas aid really reach people in poor communities? Oxfam Australia major donor David Morawetz sets off to a small fishing village in India to discover the truth.
“Only the most foolhardy or ill-informed tourist would dare venture to India from April to September,” writes Sarah MacDonald in the brilliant book Holy Cow: an Indian Adventure which I’m reading at present. So why are we here in May?
Actually, the main aim of our visit is to spend a couple of weeks visiting the Himalayas — Sikkim and Bhutan — where it will be cooler. But since we are already in the region, my partner Jan and I thought it would be interesting to visit a project that the Morawetz Social Justice Fund has supported through Oxfam Australia — women’s micro-credit savings and loan cooperatives in Orissa, one of the poorest states in India. I wanted to see first-hand whether overseas aid really does reach those at the grassroots.
Our journey starts from Bhubaneswar — an eight-hour train ride south of Kolkata — with Mr Laxman Nayak, Secretary of the Coastal People’s Development Association as our escort — a man with boundless energy and a passion for social justice.
We drive for two hours in a four-wheel-drive over roads that start out excellent, then decline in quality, until, at the end, we have to walk the last couple of hundred metres. Our destination is a small poor fishing village in the Astarang Block of Puri District.
A welcoming committee of about 50 women from the Maa Shakti Self-Help Savings Co-operative come out to meet us. The full co-operative consists of 482 women, mostly Hindu, some Muslims and possibly a few Christians as well. The women give us a high-pitched ululating welcome cry. Amazingly, this is the same cry we received when we visited an Oxfam Australia project in an Ethiopian village a year ago.
The aims of the cooperative are to enable the women to increase their savings, provide them with credit, address issues important to the fishing community and develop awareness of group concept, leadership and participation.
In Australian dollars, the cooperative’s total funds are about $10,000, total outstanding loans are about the same and total cumulative loans are about $50,000. The first loan tends to be about AUD $15, and each borrower can then borrow more as they continue to return their loans. The average loan size now is about AUD $50–70.
The cooperative began some years ago with each woman saving 10 rupees a month (about AUD 30 cents). They found this was not enough, so they doubled it, and then increased it a bit more. Oxfam Australia’s contribution, as I understand it, is to help facilitate the process of setting up the cooperative and then support it over time until it becomes totally self-sufficient. Once it is self-sufficient, the facilitators move on to start and support another cooperative.
Oxfam Australia has worked in the Orissa area for 14 years, supporting a range of projects in various villages along the coast.
Members of the Maa Shakti Self-Help Savings Co-operative in the small fishing village of Astarang in the Puri District, India. The project helps poor women in the community save money and access credit to support their fishing businesses and pay for family health care, education and celebrations. Photo: David Morawetz.
After our initial welcome, we have a question-and-answer session with the women in a large community building, with Laxman kindly translating into the local Orissan language, Uria. Impressively, Laxman himself speaks five languages — Uria, Hindi, English, Telegu and Bengali.
The women are very warm and friendly to us and respond confidently to our questions. They tell us that they mainly use the loans to repair fishing nets and boats, to support the health of their sick children, for education, for marriage ceremonies and to improve crops. Because there are not enough funds
for all members to borrow at the same time, the group decides on the sequence. Once one person repays, the next person can borrow.
Interest is paid — 12% on savings and 24% on loans — with around 85–90% of loans repaid on time. The interest rate for loans is much lower than the exorbitant ones they used to have to pay money-lenders — their only alternative for borrowing money before the co-operative was established.
Once all costs associated with the cooperative have been met, 60% of the profits are distributed amongst members, 10% goes to an education fund, 10% are for a building fund, 10% is for a charitable fund — for example, one woman has a son with cancer who the members agreed to help — and 10% is for ‘other uses’. One project which resulted from the program is a pond to provide fresh drinking water for the community and there have been several other projects like this. Information and learning exchanges between cooperatives occur regularly, which must be a great boost to their self-esteem.
The women say that while in the beginning, their husbands were against their participation in the co-operative, they now see how it helps the family economically and are in favour of it.
After the meeting ends, to my surprise, at least a dozen women come up to me, a male, and insist on shaking my hand. I remember well visits to Indian villages 43 years ago when I first visited the country — village women were friendly then, but I certainly don’t remember any of them being so ‘bold’ as to want to shake my hand.
And perhaps that is just as important as any of the benefits outlined above, the women in the cooperative appear to be very confident and assertive —
very different from the ‘traditional submissive Indian wife’.
After a couple of hours, we leave this village and drive for an hour or so to Konark, to a second meeting. This time, we are meeting 40–50 women from
the Women’s Association of Thrift Cooperatives. Once again, the women are confident and assertive. Once again, at the end of the meeting, a bunch of them come up to me and initiate handshakes.
So our question is answered. Does overseas aid money reach the grassroots? In these Oxfam projects, it definitely does.
In this case it enables women who are among the poorest of the poor to save money. It enables them to borrow to repair their fishing nets and fishing boats, thereby enabling them to continue earning a living; and it enables them to borrow to improve the health and education of their children.
Just as importantly, the cooperatives help women to organise, to support each other and to improve their self-esteem and assertiveness. And they help women to turn a blind eye to differences of caste and religion, focussing instead on what they have in common.
In short, this looks to me to be grassroots community development at its best.
But I take my hat off to what has been done, and what continues to be done, under the most difficult of circumstances, by Laxman Nayak and his fellow workers and by Oxfam Australia.
It is a privilege to be associated in a small way with their magnificent work.
David Morawetz is a Melbourne psychologist and founder and director of the Morawetz Social Justice Fund, which supports a number of Oxfam Australia programs around the world.
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