Kansas City women focus on micro-finance

All too often charitable causes and organisations looking for funding focus on symptomatic poverty, responding to the causes of poverty worldwide in a similar manner to a doctor giving a patient painkillers for a cancer tumor instead of removing the tumor. We donate so that children in poverty around the world can get food, education, clothing, medicines and various other basic needs. But it doesn’t solve the problem of why they’re in poverty in the first place.

The question of why a child, or an adult for that matter, is living in poverty in Africa, Asia, or indeed Europe or America does not mean that we must look at what brought them there but rather what keeps them there. This isn’t a reference to colonialism, neo-colonialism or any of these explanations, the problem may be as simple as the wrong kind of charity being given.

Giving a homeless person a few coins is equivalent to the some $6.6 billion donated by Americans each year to various charitable causes around the world. It doesn’t stop the cycle. A local movement here in Kansas thinks they have the answer to this problem though.

Kansas City Women Go Global is a local Kansas City movement that’s teaming up with the longstanding Foundation for International Community Assistance (FINCA) to raise money for microfinance initiatives that they believe will break the cycle of poverty far better than the normal pattern of charity provision that has done little to redress the inequality in the world for the last few hundred years.

On the FINCA website the organization points out that a microloan of $1000 can help a woman in Afghanistan start up a micro-business, such as cultivating an underdeveloped patch of farmland, which will help her earn an independent income and give her children a better life than what she has had, this is the breaking of the cycle and the creation of an upward trajectory.

Another example on their website is that of a woman in India who used a loan of $300 to buy beehives and protective equipment, she now owns over 60 hives and earns a significant income, far better than the $2 per day she achieved before.

FINCA focuses on emancipating women from poverty, and Kansas City Women Go Global is supporting the organization for this reason. It is not a show of female camaraderie or discrimination, rather it is a reflection of reality, 70% of people in poverty globally are female, and according to international studies, women tend to be more reliable clients, although such findings are questioned.

“Having visited many of our village banks to witness the difference that microfinance can make, I have been humbled by the passionate feedback we receive from our borrowers,” said Kansas City resident Jo Ann Field. “They repeatedly demonstrate that microfinance is a powerfully creative, effective strategy for fostering economic independence.”

Field has served on the FINCA advisory board and board of directors for 15 years and is among the women leading the Kansas City Women Go Global movement.