By Bill Brower | GlobalGiving Field Program Officer
Bill Brower is a Field Program Officer with GlobalGiving who visited our partners’ projects throughout South and Southeast Asia. On June 19th he visited a financial literacy training in a mobile classroom. His “Postcard” from the visit:
A few years ago, Mann Deshi started requiring financial literacy courses for women wanting to take out a small loan to improve the success rate of the initiatives the women undertook with the money. Since men would often be involved in the decisions of what to do with the money, Mann Deshi then began requiring that the husbands also complete the course. At the request of women in targeted rural areas (who would find it difficult if not prohibitive to make the trainings if they were held in the town of Mhaswad), Mann Deshi outfitted a bus to be a fully functional mobile classroom in order to bring the course to the beneficiary communities.
The bus was comfortably seating ten when I saw it. I could see how one might forget they weren’t in an actual classroom during the course of the day. There were even sewing machines in the back for other vocational training courses.
I visited the home of a couple of women who have received loans from Mann Deshi. Sujata Mane used her first loan to buy a buffalo. With her second she bought a noodle maker. She used the profits of selling the noodles in Bombay to repay the loan and then secured a third loan to purchase a spice mixer. Sujata, along with her mother-in-law, makes biryani and chili mixes (she has arguably the best smelling house in India) which she sells to local restaurants and family members take to sell in Pune. Word must be spreading because she also had two walk-up customers while I was there. Quite the entrepreneur, Sujata wants to expand her operations and bring on some day laborers to help. I asked the woman at the other home I visited if her family’s life was better since receiving loans from Mann Deshi. She said they were because she’s been able to pay for the education of her children and nieces and nephews.
All of this is win-win corporate social responsibility for the Foundation’s associated co-op bank: The bank gets a greater number of more effective customers and the customers are more capable of using the services provided by the bank to improve their economic situation.
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