Ola Clement is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Hope Worldwide. In this interview with JOSEPH OKOGHENUN, Ola, who is currently working with rural households in 190 communities through Household Economic Strengthening Scheme, gives progress report on the scheme and shares information on how the poor can be empowered economicallyWHY do local producers find it difficult to contribute to our economy'INFRRASTRUCTURE decay is a big problem. Go to Ogbomoso in Osun State, you will see mangoes and cashew rotting along the road. Yet, we are waiting for canned mango drinks from abroad! Why is the potential under-utilised or not optimised' A lot has to do with our administration. There are few things we can do without the locals; whether we like it or not, they are still going to plant mangoes and other produce next year. They are there for us. Can we provide extra- information and asset to these ones for economic growth'Do we know the potentials of mangoes' And we say we want to be the topmost economy in the world through Vision 2020. Certainly, we shall not get Vision 2020 if rural economy is neglected. According to the last economic report of Nigeria, farming still contributes more to our GDP ( national gross domestic product) than oil does.What does your Household Economic Strengthening Scheme do to boost participation of the poor in our economy'It has a lot of relationship. We believe that the best way to continue to support a child is to empower the family. It is when there is failing in the family, that children become vulnerable to the attention of the society.We have realised that family fails when there is economic poverty in that family as the family would not be able to send the child to school, cater for the child's healthcare.Our Household Economic Strengthening Programme is to fill the gap of economic poverty in families, family failures, dislocation of the family producing vulnerable children and generational poverty. We want to break generation poverty.Through the programme, we look for opportunity of supporting dislocated families so that the head of the family identifies a trade he or she wants to involve in; we encourage the person to join a local and savings association, which we midwifed from several caregivers and entrepreneurs of this type of family we are talking about. We will then assess their skills, competence, business viability, conduct market through our market specialist volunteers from Holland, Canada and Kenya to support these households. These volunteers are in Nigeria for the next one-year. They will work with our rural women to do business better. They teach them how to package, for example, Akara (bean cake) so as to give them edge and sustainability in the market. We then give these women loan through savings and loan account in the form of a micro-credit at a minimal interest rate; in the first two months the interest rate is free.We did this experiment in Onitsha with 23 People Living With HIV/AIDS (PLWA) in 2006. In one year, we recorded over 96 per cent repayment. The Onitsha group has over 5,000 members now, makes over N5 million turnaround annually and is ready to be a micro-finance bank.Micro-finance works, but participant needs commitment and organisation to mentor them to expunge corruption among them. If we expunge corruption, this country will turn around overnight. The bane of our problem is corruption.We do not ask these women to give collateral; banks are asking for collateral because they are not interested and do not want to involve in their customer's lives. If a bank has relationship with you and is helping you to plan, it would not ask you for collateral, because they know the potentials of your success. So, in our Household Economic Strengthening Scheme, one does not need collateral, but relationship to participate in it. We have set this scheme up in over 190 communities.What should government do to empower the poor economically'Nigeria's population is more than that of the West Africa population. Nigeria has huge market. But what has been preventing the poor from participating in our economy is disorganised markets; coordination is lacking. For example, in Ikire, Osun State, there are so many women, who fry plantain, which they are not able to sell. But Lagos has high demand for plantain. The same thing goes for Osun's Akara. It is like sleeping tablet when eaten with Agege bread. Most times, people do not participate in market because there is no information. People participate in stock exchange market because there is information. The Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) regulates our participation in public liability companies. Just as we need information at that level, the average rural market woman needs information to operate effectively. Therefore, government needs to facilitate access to information to enable the poor to participate in economic development; access to information bridges gap between the producer and the consumer.Our local market needs to be educated on the psychology of the consumer; on why he would consume, for instance, a certain kind of Akara. Our traders actually need that kind of skill. But government-owned vocational institutions, which are supposed to teach theses skills, have become avenue to accelerate corruption through collection of capital votes; a lot of our vocational institutions are not only empty but devoid of contemporary knowledge of understanding market. Therefore, it is important that vocational institutions being built by government provide knowledge to micro-skilled Nigerians to run micro-businesses.It is also important that there should be information board in local government councils and vocational centres on goods and services people elsewhere need. Government at the local level needs to empower rural dwellers to know moving goods in local economy so that there would be informed of how many people are buying roasted plantain, suya, or mango in a particular market. But we do not have that. So, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) sits in Abuja to project inflation. But do we know that there is local inflation' Every time I use NBS figures to calculate inflation, I under-deliver as an administrator. There is always a disconnect between national inflation as released by NBS and local inflations. So, it is important that we start teaching micro-enterprises to local market women on how to interpret market information to the advantages of their businesses and how to become competitive.
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