A report from the field from John Travis

I just spent a few hours at the Alela Modern Primary School in Lira, Uganda. I have been here several times before. My first visit was to scout the school before the well was installed. I was there again one time during the construction of the septics and toilets, and once after all of the construction was completed. This visit was different though. This time I got to sit in on a meeting of the Village Savings and Loan Association (VSLA) and watch something really life-changing.

The VSLA is a relatively new part of Drop in the Bucket’s program. It was originally developed about two years ago, by a good friend of ours named Lowna, who had been working in northern Uganda. She had been working in the local villages setting up beading programs. Beading programs are where women from the refugee camps take magazines and turn the pages into paper beads that are then sold in other countries to raise money. The beading programs were very effective in providing industry to areas where there was often very few ways for women to earn money and support their families. Many of the women involved were widowed during the war, so initiatives like the beading programs were very important.

Working in the field it quickly became apparent to us that although many organizations were involved with setting up water committees. They rarely seemed to work, or do anything more than pay lip service to the concept of sustainability. After spending a couple of years struggling to get people to attend water committee meetings in the long term, we realized we had to try a different approach.

The only thing that made sense to us was incentivizing the idea of keeping the well working, and so we enlisted Lowna to help put something together that she thought would work. Over the next few months Lowna drafted a 63 page manual that detailed out the entire VSLA program. Six months later, I got to sit in on a meeting of one group in Pece Pu Dyek just outside Gulu, Uganda and watch as villagers got to divide up the interest their group had collected. It was pretty amazing to watch and the looks on the faces of the group of mainly women, making money for the first time in their lives, was something I will never forget.

Trying to sum it up in a few paragraphs is almost as unrealistic as expecting people reading this to make it through a 63 page manual, but I am going to present an overview, so please bear with me.

Ideally each VSLA group consists of the thirty people from the community surrounding the school that are the most financially stable. They elect a chairperson, treasurer, secretary and a caretaker. Each person is given a key to a three-key lockbox that can only be opened when all of the keys are present. The box is kept by the caretaker, who is responsible for bringing it to the VSLA meetings. The caretaker does not have a key to the lockbox.
These thirty people contribute monthly water user fees, which are determined by the VSLA members. Once this money has achieved a fixed threshold (enough to cover any maintenance and repairs to the well) VSLA members are allowed to borrow from the fund. Money can only be used for income generating activities, for instance buying milking goats and selling the milk, or raising chickens. Even things like setting up a carpentry business or buying cell phone chargers and a generator and having people pay you to charge their phones are things we have seen.

The guidelines and training we carry out teaches the VSLA members how to set their own interest rates, the duration of the loan and also which ideas are likely to work and which ones are likely to fail. Ultimately though, once the training is complete we step back and allowed them to run the program themselves with periodic monitoring and guidance when necessary.

At Alela Modern I was stunned to see that when examining their books the two VSLA groups there, in just one year had already raised slightly over 5 million Shillings (approx $1779 USD). Not bad for a very poor rural community where prior to this nobody had ever even dreamed of earning that kind of money. The best part is though, that it is not a handout. These villagers earned this money themselves. Drop in the Bucket did not contribute even one penny into the initial fund, the Villagers at the Alela Modern Primary School took their own first steps towards financial independence on their own and achieved it themselves. Our contribution came down to training, guidance, repeated visits to the site and a lot of patience, but when it works that pay-off is beyond anything I can think of.