What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [28]
In the six years since her first visit to Pokuase, WomensTrust, the nonprofit she founded, has distributed a total of $182,000 in more than two thousand uncollateralized micro-loans to stimulate entrepreneurship and economic development.
The loans have already brought important, if sometimes subtle, changes to the village. Not only have they altered the lives of women who had earned little more than subsistence from makeshift businesses—selling bread, cassavas, charcoal, fabrics, footwear, and pots and pans—they have seeded other potentially far-reaching changes, too. “Women’s lives are improving. They are dressing better. Women who were selling goods off their heads have gotten the confidence and the money to get a table to sell off of. Women who were selling off tables have taken bigger loans and opened little kiosks. Women who bake and manufacture goods have hired more people and gotten bigger ovens or whatever they needed to produce more. And sometimes one of them says, ‘We’re all going to town to buy stuff from wholesalers. Why don’t we become a wholesaler?’ They diversify and take action on their business ideas. It’s amazing.”
The benefits appear to be social as well as economic. Husbands, for instance, are treating spouses with more respect. “Everything is pride and shame, and in a place where husbands often can’t get a job, women now are able to help a family out of poverty. Maybe the men don’t feel as trapped,” she said. Physical abuse of wives has until recently been a significant and widespread problem in Pokuase as in the rest of Ghana, where a UN study in 2008 found that 34 percent of all women still consider violence against them by husbands justifiable. “Whatever the explanation,” Dana said, “the local public nurse in Pokuase says that wife beating has gone way down since WomensTrust started giving out loans.”
Pokuase’s problems have hardly disappeared. Referred to as an urban village, to some it is just a slum town an hour north of Ghana’s capital, Accra, by public transportation. It sits directly off a highway being built by the Chinese. The streets are red, dusty, and littered with plastic bags and garbage. The best homes are made of cement, the rest of scrap metal. Latrines remain highly unsanitary. Too few clean wells and too frequent use of bacteria-ridden river water remain constant threats to public health. Maternal mortality rates, anemia from i ron-poor nutrition, and hypertension remain epidemically high.
Girls still struggle with family pressure to leave school young and work for their families. But it is also true that since Dana began WomensTrust in the village, more girls are staying in school beyond sixth grade. When she arrived, families commonly believed that it was not worth the investment of their meager resources to educate girls. The number now finishing ninth grade is rising rapidly.
Now, more conventional measures of Dana and WomensTrust’s success have begun to accumulate. In 2006, the nonprofit was awarded a $10,000 “Stand for a Better World” award by Mannington Mills. Then the United Nations African Mothers Association gave the organization $10,000 to start an entrepreneurs’ club. And Dana was selected as a 2008 Purpose Prize fellow, an award that recognizes people over sixty who defy societal expectations by using their creativity and talent to address critical social problems. In the spring of 2009, at age sixty-six, she was invited to serve as the Lois Langland Alumna-in-Residence at Scripps College in Claremont, California, and to teach undergraduate