Mafumba 1011 Group

Livingstone attracts many tourists because of the mighty Victoria Falls. It is the home of the five women that make up Mafumba 1011 group. All these women are happy because they have a source of income from their second-hand businesses (salaula), raising livestock and running restaurants. These businesses have been around since 2019. Through these businesses they are able to send their twenty-eight children to school by covering all their education costs.

A few of the older children are helping the women run their businesses during the weekends and school holidays so that they can earn an income to use as pocket money to buy things they need. There are both married as well as widow women that have all been putting in their best to keep their businesses lucrative. The average age for the members are forty-six year. However, the women hope to employ other people like themselves because they understand how difficult life gets when you don’t have a stable source of income. Microloan Foundation Zambia trained these women in entrepreneurship as soon as they became member of the Foundation. The members are requesting a loan to invest in their individual income generating activities.

Ethel seen on her land where she keeps goats. She has thirty goats at the moment and wants to buy building materials to build a shed for her goats with her share of this loan. This is in preparation for the coming rains in December this year. Ethel is forty-six years old and has four children going to school on a full-time basis. Her husband is a working in Livingstone. He helps Ethel to look after the goats when he is off work. The profit Ethel gets from selling her goats goes towards covering her children’s education costs as well as contributing towards the household costs. She sells the goats from her rural home or at the main market. She enjoys her business because it is rewarding yet easy to run because goats are easy to manage. She hopes to build a small house with good sanitation in the future so that she can charge them rent out the house and make more money.

The Microloan Foundation in Zambia lend to female entrepreneurs using the ‘centre’ model. A centre is typically made up of 3-4 sub-groups and these sub-groups almost always have five members. Each centre has its own name and the sub-groups within the centre share the same name. Each person within the group of five women is responsible for repaying her loan but the members support each other and if a member is unable to repay her loan on time, then the group assumes responsibility for repayment. Loan officers provide training to the groups, although it is expected that centre leaders will eventually assume responsibility for providing some of the basic training.

If you are lending, please be aware that due to the current COVID-19 pandemic your repayments could be at greater risk of delay or default.