FARMSE commits to building resilience among ultra-poor households
Financial Access for Rural Markets and Social Enterprises (FARMSE) has expressed commitment to supporting ultra-poor households to enable them graduate out of poverty and be self-reliant and food secure.
FARMSE Rural and Microfinance Specialist, Rodgers Mbekeyani, said his organization hopes to achieve this goal through provision of loans to cooperatives and village savings and loan associations (VSLAs).
Mbekeyani made the sentiments in Chikwawa recently during a media tour organized to appreciate the impact of the project.
“Through our partnership with various institutions and banks, FARMSE wants to ensure banking services penetrate in remote areas so that people in the villages should access loans for their small and medium enterprises,” he said.
Care Malawi is the partner of the project in Chikwawa. The organization’s project field officer, Esther Yuda, said they launched the Tidzidalire Project in 2019 targeting VSLAs with training on how they can manage their funds in order to achieve self-reliance.
Yuda said the project has, so far, reached out to over 2, 050 farmers who are now doing various businesses.
One of the beneficiaries of the project in Traditional Authority Maseya, Alfred Caros, said the K228, 000 seed money he got from the project enable him to venture into butchery business and other businesses.
Another beneficiary from the same area, Mercy Mathias, said the training she received from Care Malawi motivated her to dump casual labour to venture into business.
Mathias said her vision is to build a modern and venture into a motorcycle taxi business.
“I am grateful to CARE Malawi as at the mean time I am financially stable as compared to the past,” she said.
Care Malawi supports increasing market linkages, promotes diversified livelihoods as well as organizes village savings and loans association and provides entrepreneurship training.
Apart from Care Malawi, FARMSE is also working with Save the Children, World Relief, COMSIP Cooperative Union and OXFAM in implementing different interventions to graduate the ultra-poor in Mzimba, Salima, Dedza, Balaka, Mangochi, Machinga, Phalombe, Mulanje and Chikwawa with a tune of K1.5 billion.
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FARMSE approach is indeed a good one but gives a lot of promises which it fails to accomplish I may say their work with its partners is rather tentative
Groups were promised to be enhanced through engaging them in seed multiplication , value addition businesses and many fields but we don’t see them
Please the Government assess the intentions of some NGOs otherwise
we Malawians are going to be bluffed and continue living in poverty