During a trip to Myanmar (Burma) in January, four Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand youth met elders of the Zo Synod of the Presbyterian Church of Myanmar with a view to establishing a microcredit scheme in their community.
Microcredit involves lending small amounts of money at low interest to people too poor to qualify for conventional bank loans. To ensure repayment, the microcredit schemes use a system of “solidarity groups”. These small informal groups apply together for loans and its members act as co-guarantors of repayment and support one another’s efforts at economic self-advancement.
Once a community bank has been established, it is self-sustaining and loans are made at the minimum interest rate necessary to cover the administration costs of the scheme as well as increasing the capital pool to keep up with inflation.
Although some accountability is necessary, it is felt that to simply dictate criteria to the people of the Zo community would run very much counter to the core value of partnership and exacerbate the power imbalance present in many donor-recipient relationships. While there is always a desire to assert some degree of control over money we give, it is necessary to find a balance which allows the Zo community a large degree of autonomy in deciding how the scheme is actually run.
In order to raise the capital (around US$10,000) for this scheme and hopefully others in the future, we have set up a “co-operative” organisation in New Zealand.
Aotearoa Development Cooperative (ADC) donors in New Zealand are encouraged to be much more than merely financially involved. As well as gaining an understanding of what microcredit involves and keeping up-to-date with the current project, the idea is that all will be actively involved in the decision-making of the co-operative. Most importantly in this respect however, ADC seeks to foster and encourage a sense of community among the participants in New Zealand – a sense of joint ownership of the project, rather than an individual contribution through an unfamiliar medium.
Thus, ADC is different from many other development or aid organisations in that it is an intentionally grass-roots organisation at both ends – what are traditionally described as the “donor” and “recipient” communities. It is central to ADC’s intended ethos that the community in Myanmar has a relationship with a community in New Zealand, not an organisation. For more info, email apcolgan@yahoo.co.nz.
Andrew Colgan