Free The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World by Jacqueline Novogratz Page A

other "labor-saving devices." I would think of a photo I once saw of a rural man riding a donkey as his wife walked alongside, carrying a load of wood on her head. "Labor-saving devices for whom?" I would ask. "And how do we know they are the right ones?"
    Ultimately, most agreed that an experiment in providing credit to women made great sense. We sat for hours inside each of three commercial banks; not a single low-income woman walked through their doors. In the Kigali market, women told us they paid up to 10 percent interest daily to moneylenders so that they could run their businesses. Clearly, we were onto something.
    Where individual opinions differed was in whether we should charge interest to the women, an ongoing debate in microfinance programs the world over at the time. Many people we met at international agencies felt it was unjust or plain usurious to be charging interest to some of the poorest people in society.
    "How can you justify making money off the backs of the poor themselves?" one woman asked.
    Though we explained over and over that the organization was a nonprofit and would not cover the costs of lending, our arguments often fell on deaf ears.
    "These women have no collateral," one minister told us. "How will you know they will repay?"
    "With your grants, you know they will not repay, so this is, to start, a bonus," we said. "Furthermore, everything we're seeing from other programs in the world indicates that poor women do, in fact, repay."

    When we returned to the market and spoke to the women themselves, there was great excitement about a program that would lend to them at fair interest rates (we didn't know what it was yet, but we knew it would be much lower than what they were currently paying). We would help them with skills and connect them with other women. Ultimately, it was these women we listened to most carefully.
    After a few days, Honorata, Veronique, and I had had enough. Two reasons poor women needed this program were because they didn't have collateral and because they had extremely low income levels. The women themselves certainly wanted access to credit. There would always be naysayers, we told ourselves; in fact, it was this spirit that ultimately inspired the organization's name, Duterimbere, which means to go forward with enthusiasm. Besides, by this time a formidable group of "founders," was emerging, powerful women in Kigali who stood behind the idea of a credit institution for women and were willing to work to make it real. Though we had yet to work out the details, our momentum was building.
    Still, we had to revisit the question of whether or not to charge interest, even with some members of Duterimbere's founding group. At a meeting with several of the women, I was asked to explain again why we wanted to make money from poor women.
    "We will not make money," I repeated, "at least not in the short term, though we could grow and sustain ourselves if we truly built an institution that covered costs in the long-term. Think of charging fair interest as practice for the women to interact with the formal economy. It will help them build real businesses-and they want the option to borrow! Don't you think the poor women are capable of success?"
    "Of course they're capable," one woman shot back.
    "Then let's give them a chance to prove to us-and to themselves just how capable they are. In time, they'll be able to borrow larger amounts of money. They'll have a track record for the first time in their lives."
    Against local conventional wisdom, our founders' group bet on the strength of the women and the belief that ultimately they belonged in the formal economy. We decided to charge interest at near-commercial bank rates.
    The organization was beginning to take shape, but the most important work was establishing the political goodwill to give the institution grounding. Our biggest asset in getting started was the commitment of the three most powerful women in government. Prudence, Agnes,