HELPING
FAMILIES IN EXTREME POVERTY TO PULL THEMSELVES OUT OF IT
ESN Bigger Meals Ltd in partnership
with One World One People
2021 Progress Report
"Unleashing of energy and creativity in each human
being is the answer to poverty." — Professor Muhammad Yunus.
We already knew we had a reliable way to help impoverished
families in rural Uganda unleash their talents and abilities to
pull themselves out of extreme poverty. But could we make it self-sufficient
so it wouldn't need any outside funding to survive once it was fully
up and running? So before COVID-19, we conducted a beautiful experiment
to find out. (By impoverished, we mean families who live on $1 to
$5 US a day who often only eat one meal a day. Families who can’t
afford to send their children to school. They can’t afford
hospitals or even basic medicines and if any of them get really
sick or injured, they normally just suffer and sometimes die.)
In this new century, millions of people in the world’s
poorest countries remain imprisoned, enslaved and in chains. They
are trapped in the prison of poverty. It is time to set them free.’
— Nelson Mandela
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Some
of our borrowers' children. From the left to right, Christopher, Angel
and Bridget. © ESN Bigger Meals Ltd
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Inspired by the Grameen Bank, which has helped
millions of people pull themselves out of poverty, we gave 45 impoverished
people (mostly women) one day’s worth of free training on
how to successfully manage and run their own business. Then once
they had chosen a business idea they could earn a steady and reliable
income from, we gave them a micro-credit loan for 100,000 UGX (US$27)
and free ongoing support whenever they needed it. We had faith that
they would repay their loan because we knew that the more impoverished
people are, the more desperate they are to get themselves and their
families out of poverty. And we knew that if they were given a once
in a lifetime opportunity to do just that, they would take it with
both hands and work hard.
"There
is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the
resources to get rid of it.' —
Martin Luther King Jr.
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Concy and her daughter.
© ESN Bigger Meals Ltd
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We
made 92 loans worth UGX 9,700,000 (US$2,587) and some borrowers
received further loans of 200,000 and 300,000 UGX because they
repaid their earlier loans swiftly with their hard work and business
success. We charged a tiny amount of interest on the loans in
the hope of slowly expanding the amount of money we had to lend
so we could in turn help more impoverished families.
After 7 months our borrower repayment rate stood at an outstanding
93.06%. Sadly some borrowers simply could not repay their debts.
One loan had to be written off when a female borrower’s
husband took the loan money off her and beat her very badly. He
then apparently wasted the money on drinking. Two other borrowers
suffered serious health problems and sadly passed away. Another
disappeared after receiving her loan money.
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‘Poverty
is the worst form of violence.’ —
Mahatma Gandhi
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Did our experiment
succeed in helping impoverished people pull themselves and their families
out of poverty?
After seven months we observed:
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Margaret selling her plastic shoes.
© ESN Bigger Meals Ltd
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Most of the businesses started were agricultural as that’s
the main activity in the rural community we conducted the experiment
in. Other businesses included:
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What is our goal and how do we decide if a family has
successfully pulled themselves out of poverty?
2021 COVID update
Recently
we followed up to try to see if our efforts had really succeeded
in helping families pull themselves out of poverty in the long
term despite the effects of COVID-19 enforced lockdowns. Here
is what we have learned:
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Challenges ahead
There were
plenty of mistakes we made that we have learned from and there
are also many challenges we still need to carefully address and
overcome.
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We need to carefully avoid raising expectations
for loans beyond the money available for us to lend. Once
during the project, one of our volunteers took to lending
out her own money to avoid shattering the hopes of desperate
people when we ran out of money because of high demand. |
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We were far too reliant on our kind-hearted volunteers
who also have other jobs they needed to do to feed their families.
We need to pay for full-time staff who we can invest in through
training so they can, in turn, deliver quality service to
our beneficiaries. |
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Some more of our borrowers' children.
© ESN Bigger Meals Ltd
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In some families, we learned that loan disbursements
to women had created resentment and stigma. Some men even ordered
their wives to give them a portion of the money they made from their
businesses less they leave their home and there were also some cases
of domestic violence. |
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We need to send our Project Manager to Bangladesh to do a brief
internship with Grameen Bank to learn all of their best practices
and how they overcome some of the many challenges we are facing like
how to safeguard women borrowers from domestic violence. We also need
to buy their specialised Branch Management software. |
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We need to become entirely self-sufficient so we don’t
need donations in the long term. To do that we need to replicate
what the Grameen Bank has done by lending to a sufficient number
of borrowers and achieving a high enough borrower repayment rate
that the interest earned can pay for the cost of lending and also
expand the funds we have available to lend to more and more new
borrowers/beneficiaries. Because ESN Bigger Meals is a not-for-profit
company limited by guarantee we have the advantage of never having
to pay shareholders and investors a return, unlike commercial lending
businesses. Therefore, our cost of lending is mostly made up of
paying staff wages and costs as well as bad debts arising from when
borrowers die or become unable to repay their loans through no fault
of their own. Life in extreme poverty can all too easily become
just too hard and brutal at times.
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What else are we doing for families living in extreme poverty?
Helping populations living in extreme poverty to protect themselves from climate
change through mass tree planting.
We want to mass-produce seed-balls in Uganda to
help make it easy for school children and people living in rural
places to plant billions of trees throughout Uganda and Africa.
You can learn more about seed-balls here:
To aid that effort we will focus heavily on climate change education.
We have designed a very simple, but effective, single page climate
change education leaflet. Its purpose is to educate Ugandans
who live in rural areas about the dangers of climate change and
greatly motivate them to plant new trees and look after them.
We’re also designing a new and scientifically up-to-date
climate change education program for schools which will focus
mostly on the science behind planting new trees for the future
versus the science of cutting them down unsustainably, which is
deforesting vast areas of Uganda and putting those areas at greater
risk of droughts and floods.
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Tree planting.
© ESN Bigger Meals Ltd
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Using Clean Technology to prevent fuel poverty and save lives.
The world’s countries now need to keep global
warming under 1.5° C by 2030 to avoid catastrophic warming.
Meanwhile, approximately three billion people in the world still
cook using open fires or simple stoves using kerosene, wood, charcoal,
coal and other biomass, and as many of them as possible now urgently
need access to alternative clean cooking and water pasteurising
technology. Also, globally, an estimated 4.3 million people (mostly
women and children) die annually from exposure to smoke from charcoal
and biomass, which causes acute respiratory illnesses, cancer,
heart disease and cataracts. Finally, two billion people are thought
to lack access to clean water, which causes an estimated 485,000
diarrhoeal deaths per year due to waterborne parasites and bacterium.
Please see our solar
oven and water pasteuriser we have designed especially to
help solve all of these urgent issues via ESN
Bigger Meals Clean Technology. |
Our solar oven.
© ESN Bigger Meals Ltd
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