A micro­cre­dit effort oper­ated by Rwanda’s cen­tral bank focuses on mak­ing loans to women. Rwan­dan women who want to start up cof­fee shops, stores or agri­cul­ture busi­ness can apply at the coun­tries banks for the loans.

The pro­gram started in early July and already some gov­ern­ment offi­cials say the selec­tion process is not strict enough. With access to small loans being new in the coun­try, some women do not have a busi­ness plan for how to repay the loan. The cen­tral bank says they will begin an edu­ca­tion pro­gram for women to com­bat the problem.

For a fur­ther descrip­tion on the new micro­cre­dit oper­a­tion in Rwanda we turn to this snip­pet from IPS reporter Aimable Twahirwa.

The Rwanda cen­tral bank has estab­lished a mech­a­nism of micro loans for all finan­cial insti­tu­tions that lend to female entre­pre­neurs. Loans for projects declared viable are against col­lat­eral guar­an­tees, to be paid back over a long period.

Since the estab­lish­ment of this new credit scheme early this year, at least 6,568 women have received assis­tance for micro– and small enter­prises from the gov­ern­ment, inter­na­tional donors and NGOs worth 890,000 U.S. dol­lars, accord­ing to the cen­tral bank.

Accord­ing to Kan­imba, many of these are asso­ci­a­tions that own both cof­fee farms and shops, for instance, in a new ini­tia­tive to finance the reduc­tion of poverty.

The asso­ci­a­tions “served as (one of) the main tools to address the mul­ti­ple causes of poverty, unem­ploy­ment and social exclu­sion espe­cially in rural areas,” min­is­ter Mujawa­mariya remarked. “Slowly but surely, the lives of rural women are chang­ing fol­low­ing the new credit scheme,” she told IPS.

But busi­ness­woman Solange Uwim­babazi, who runs a shop at Nyabu­gogo mar­ket near Kigali city, insists that it is quite dif­fi­cult for poor women to access credit in a sit­u­a­tion where the process of allo­ca­tion of loans by banks is far from transparent.

“There is dis­crim­i­na­tion,” the entre­pre­neur, a mother of five, observes. “Some groups of women are excluded to ben­e­fit from loans. The wealth­i­est groups are con­sid­ered the most,” she adds.

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