ENHANCING COMMUNITY SERVICE THROUGH THE PROVISION OF MICROFINANCE

The reason why we are Rotarians and indeed why Rotary exists and continues to be very relevant to the world is the provision of service to the less fortunate in our society. Our motto of “Service above self” says it all. The 4 Avenues of Service namely; Club Service, Vocational Service, Community Service and International Service enable us to effectively execute our noble cause.

Community Service is the opportunity Rotary Clubs have to implement club projects and activities that improve life in the community. In working with communities, Rotarians have over time come to realize the need to empower these communities so that they can reasonably take care of their needs during and even long after a project has closed. Whatever type of project is carried out in the community the fear of the re-occurrence of the same problem or the failure to maintain the facilities provided after the project closure is always apparent. The main reason for this fear is that the communities we try to help live in perpetual poverty.
Pursuant to the principle of continued service to the community, microfinance has been identified as one  of the most viable tools to empower communities that Rotarians work with.
Microfinance can be defined as “the provision of financial services to low income clients, including consumers, and self employed who traditionally lack access to banking and related services”.
“It is a movement whose objective is a world in which as many poor, near poor households, as possible have permanent access to an appropriate range of high quality financial services which include among others savings, credit, insurance and funds transfers”. Microfinance is a proven tool for fighting poverty on a large scale. It provides very small loans to poor people to start or expand very small self sufficient businesses. With microfinance the communities are financially empowered to break out of the poverty circle so that they can with dignity take care of their most essential needs like food, health, shelter, clothing, education and other social obligations.

As Rotarians we need therefore to be cognizant of this powerful tool and incorporate it in our community projects. This will entail focusing on the following:
.At project design, microfinance should be one of the components that is given prominence
.Communities be sensitized and mobilized to form groups that start savings and credit schemes that will eventually turn into small financial institutions
-Provision of capacity building to the groups so that they can plan and manage well their businesses both at group and individual level
-Utilising the RCCs as a nucleus for formation of the financial groups
-Designing appropriate saving and loan products for the groups
-Providing seed capital mainly for credit
Microfinance may not be a panacea to all the poverty and social related problems but is a tool that each club should embrace and mainstream in most if not all community based projects. It may not work well with institutional based projects but history has so far shown that it is a very successful tool for empowering the poor and most the unfortunate in communities .As we implement the New Vision of RI  its imperative that we look at better, bigger and bolder projects that will enable us be more visible in our communities  and microfinance will surely give us mileage towards achieving our goals.
BY AH Charles Kulibanza Byanyima
District Microfinance Chair 2010/11
And 86TH DCA Treasurer