Around the World, Women Find Very Different Roads to Wider Rights
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The clinic already relies in part on support from US donors. Yet stretched budgets, entrenched hostility among some government officials toward the clinic's goals, and a dearth of pro-women's rights philanthropists here place the center's future in doubt.
"Over the short term," Guo says, "the future of our clinic may depend on foreign sympathizers with our cause."
- Kevin Platt
A helping hand for Africa's entrepreneurs
DAKAR, SENEGAL
A few months ago, Aminata Ndiaye and dozens of women who run textile shops in Senegal's capital did something most local businessmen saw as a blunder. They discontinued one of their bestselling items - a special cloth from Mali.
"The cost of paying off customs officers with bribes and taxes was just too high," Ms. Ndiaye explains.
But the women knew what they were doing. When the wealthier local businessmen swooped in, paid the taxes, and imported the cloth themselves, the price went through the roof. People couldn't afford it, and they began to look for a cheaper cloth - a type Ndiaye just happened to have in stock. "Now my business is booming."
All across Africa, women entrepreneurs are building on this kind of close-to-home business savvy to win a measure of economic independence - and, through that, to gradually achieve greater social and political influence.
"Often, all women here need is a little backing to get started," says Wendy Wilson Fall, West Africa regional director of National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), explaining why more development organizations are supporting small-scale credit plans designed for women.
Today's emphasis on helping female entrepreneurs is a shift from the 1970s, when aid organizations assumed that African women were mostly unpaid housewives. But the fact is that many were parlaying their knowledge about, say, the latest style of embroidery into new business opportunities.
One scheme popular throughout Africa is known here as a tontine. Women put money or other forms of capital in a common pool, and then draw straws. The winner takes all. "It's like a pyramid scheme," says Ms. Wilson Fall, "except they rarely fail, because as long as the group sticks together everyone eventually wins."
In 1993, NCNW set up a matching savings-and-credit plan around a women's tontine in Dal Diam, a village in the interior of Senegal that US President Clinton visited in April.
"We helped the villagers turn their tontine into a formal investment group, registered with the local chamber of commerce," says Wilson Fall. NCNW built wells so the women could turn their subsistence vegetable gardens into larger irrigated farms for cash crops.
Now, the annual income of the village has nearly doubled. The women have started a general store and helped build the first health clinic there.
A recent United Nations report on women's development, however, notes that men often hamper women entrepreneurs, particularly in rural communities where men mostly retain control of land. Women entrepreneurs are also constrained by their family obligations.
Yet women do have social and economic power that is not immediately apparent. In Senegal, for example, only men drive taxis, but women may own them. Women also have a surprising measure of political power, although men dominate local and national politics throughout Africa.
"Africa is overflowing with women leaders," says Soukeyna Ba of Women's Development Enterprise in Africa, based here. "They lack only the training and the means to bloom."
- David Hecht
