Sonzele Rural Bank supports women with micro-finance package
The the Sonzele Rural Bank Limited, with its headquarters at Jirapa in the Upper West Region, has assisted 968 women with a micro-finance package totalling GH¢539,175 as of June 30, this year, to organise and assist them to engage in rural enterprises and income-generating activities.
Advertisement
Under a product dubbed “Suutaa Credit with Education,” the women have benefited from the package to engage in trading, farming and income-generating activities such as soap-making, production of soya bean meals, groundnut oil processing, among other activities.
Economic activities
The General Manager of the bank, Mr Kenneth Dassah, told the Daily Graphic in an interview that the loans were to help the beneficiaries to “improve upon their economic activities and hopefully expand them, make more money and improve their living conditions”.
According to him, the women were trained in their five catchment areas, namely Wa, Jirapa, Lambussie, Hain and Nadowli by using local materials to do what they could do better, after which they were supported with micro-credits, adding that the package also included “having access to technology, entrepreneurial training and finance”.
The women, he said, were organised into groups of five and 25 and were each given credits from GH¢100 and above, depending on what they were doing.
Seedlings production
He also mentioned that they had planned to popularise the consumption of soya beans and groundnut oil due to their nutritious and medicinal value. That, he said, would start from the UWR where a laboratory is being set up at Jirapa to produce the seedlings and train people who wanted to go into its production as an income-generating venture.
Mr Dassah said the rural banks concept had shown that people with low incomes, through determination, could organise themselves to earn something substantial for a decent living, adding that this had come to disprove the wrong perception that savings were made when one had more than one needed.
On loans recovery, he said even though they had made significant progress of 98 per cent, there were few debtors who were refusing to respond to several appeals to pay back to enable the bank to grant them and new customers more loans.
