Posted by: Katherine Oglietti and Mike Krell
An ID-Ghana client and her wares
Godknows Kporha, Social Mission Manager, Initiative Development Ghana
In response to the rapidly growing population in Ghana’s capital city, fed by a large influx of migrants from rural villages, Initiative Development Ghana (ID-Ghana) caters its financial and non-financial services to deprived areas in Accra. Its approach is to target the poorest urban neighborhoods to build a more inclusive economy. It offers a combination of not only credit but also savings, insurance, and trainings to its "partners" (i.e., clients) with the contention that microcredit is a relevant but incomplete method to effectively respond to the global problem of poverty.
MIX: In ID-Ghana’s Social Performance Report, you report offering adult education training among other non-financial services. Which learning areas do these training sessions cover? How many of your clients participate in these trainings? Have you conducted any assessment as to whether clients have incorporated the skills they learned into their daily lives?
Mr. Kporha: Our trainings fall under two main headings: business and social. In our business trainings, we cover topics such as costing and pricing, customer care, business opportunity identification, record keeping, and credit management. Social topics include personal hygiene, national health insurance, domestic violence, and malaria prevention and management. These trainings have been integrated into the methodology for our new group loan product, Onipa Nua, and are compulsory for partners.
We closely monitor training attendance. In March 2010, 3,249 people received training from ID-Ghana, out of a total of 3,991 active borrowers. And while we have not yet performed an impact assessment of this new training regime, anecdotal evidence suggests that these trainings are having a positive outcome on our partners. We feel that these trainings have equipped partners with much-needed skills and knowledge regarding the effective management of loans, among other things, and that this is reflected in greatly increased loan repayment rates.
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