Sunday, August 27, 2017
Samia stresses the need to help women in Tanzania
The Vice-President Ms. Samia Suluhu has
called on banks to consider creating a special lending interest rate for women
in small and medium enterprises in a bide to reduce the high level of poverty
among them. Ms. Samia made the call during the launching of the Women
Empowerment Forum that kicked of on Friday last week in Dar es Salaam. The
event had been sponsored by CRDB Bank with the view to help women in the
country the majority of who are still faced with high level of poverty. The VP thanked
the CRDB Bank Ltd for their innovative strategies they have shown to help women
rom high interest rates which are crippling their undertakings now and then “High
interest rates are backpedalling women’s efforts in coming out of poverty
shackles,” Ms Samia said. She added that banks "should also come up with innovative
ideas to attract women in banking their savings ... I know most of them are
using piggy banks as means of saving their income. The VP launched the Dar
Women Empowerment chapter before a crowd of almost 4,000 women across the
city's five districts - Ilala, Kinondoni, Temeke, Kigamboni and Ubungo. She
said that by uniting under the umbrella of Dar Women Empowerment Forum, the
banks will go to them since the forum makes it easy for financial institutions
to address women’s needs and create tailor-made products such as loans at
affordable rates. Dar Women Empowerment Forum has some 15,000 members coming
from grassroots levels - start-ing from street to ward to district levels. Speaking
at the event, National Economic Empowerment Council Executive Director, Beng’i
Issa said Dar became the 23rd region to estab-lish such forums. “The idea after
opening a regional forum is for the same to cascade to dis-trict up to street
level in every region,” Ms Beng’i said. She said that so far Njombe, Rukwa and
Ruvuma regions have yet to create such forums in their respec-tive areas. The
Tanzania Women Commerce Chamber Secretary General, Jaquiline Maleko, said the
regional forum came after successfully establishing nine of them at border
posts to assist women from understanding their business rights and
opportunities around them. “The idea of having regional women empowerment
forums is the Brainchild of VP Samia after seeing the success of the border
posts ones. She then ordered the creation of the same starting at regional
level,” Ms Maleko said. To support the initiative, CRDB Bank, apart from
sponsoring the event that was televised live, donated 20m/- as seed money for
the revolving fund to empower women in Dar.es Salaa. CRDB Bank Managing
Director, Dr Charles Kimei, said women are good when it come to saving but
under mattresses and the bank has come up with a new product Sim Account that
operates similar to mobile phone money platforms but has a bank account. “SimAccount
is a bank on mobile phone and one can open an account from any mobile phone
service opera-tors.” “The group account is like a WhatsApp account and any one
in the group can deposit and preview the account statement to see amount
deposited or withdrawn,” Dr Kimei said. The bank used the forum to launch the
SimAccount that is geared towards simplifying banking services and combined
mobile phone money transfer and banking services. “The SimAccount will increase
banks’ financial inclusion, which at the moment stands at 17 per cent of total
bankable population,” Dr Kimei said. Ilala District Commissioner (DC), Ms
Sophia Mjema, said that in the near future they want the women forum to
establish specific areas as markets for their products. “We want to have
designated markets for selling these women’s products at specific areas in Dar.
For instance, buyers will know that if I want say flower pots, I can get them
at this area and so forth,” she said. The DC was also representing Dar RC at
the forum and she is also Dar Women Empowerment Forum chair. The agenda, she said, is empow-ering a large
number of women and elevating them to next level coming 2020. “CRDB Bank is
ready as to lend us women under the forum. We should seize the opportunity,”
she said. At the moment 23 regions, 105 municipalities, and 236 wards have
established such forums countrywide.
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