By Kemo Cham
Iye Gloria is among few parents in the village of Junttionla whose children enjoy the luxury of traveling to school by Okada (commercial motor bike), the most common form of transportation in this part of Sierra Leone.
The mother of three spends about Le10, 000 for each of her children every day, for a two-way ride. She is able to do this thanks to a village saving scheme she contributes to. Every week the women come together and contribute Le2, 000 each. As the savings grew, each member has had the opportunity to borrow from the group. This way, many of its members, like Iye, have established businesses which they use to supplement income generated from cassava cultivation, the most common economic activity in the region.
Junttionla is located in the mining region of Rutile in the Imperi Chiefdom in Bonthe District. It is one of three sister villages that sprung out of old Gangama when it was demolished to make way for what’s today the site of one of two dredges operated by the iron ore miner, Sierra Rutile Limited, in the mid-80s.
Despite being home to a Class A mining company, Rutile and its environs constitute a hotbed of poverty and deprivation. While the company’s seemingly never ending quest for more titanium endowed land has rid the community people of most of their arable lands, lack of employment opportunities has exacerbated the condition for most families here.
When old Gangama was demolished in 1986, the inhabitants were relocated to three separate communities, one of which is Junttionla. There is also Lungi, and a third one going by the original name of Gangama. Not only were these people deprived of their farm lands and other ancestral belongings, they were also moved further away from social amenities like schools and hospitals.
Due to failure of the company to meet various promises that include construction of schools, the children from these affected villages have been forced to travel long distances to school in neighboring villages. Some of these schools are located as far as 10 miles away. For these children, it entails a lot of discomfort.
It gets even more complicated for the girls, who have become victims of sexual predators, especially Okada riders who, parents say, offer to provide free ride in exchange for sex. This, among other factors, has made Bonthe and its neighboring Moyamba District two of Sierra Leone’s 16 districts with the highest rates of teenage pregnancy. Many girls have been forced to drop out of school as a consequence.
The status quo has also led to many broken marriages, as a result of foreign mine workers getting involved with local women, including those even in marriage relationships.
This was what inspired the Women’s Initiative Forum for Empowerment in Extractive (WIFEE), a local civil society organization, to form the Village Savings and Loans (VSL) scheme. The VSL is just one of the activities of WIFEE which was established in 2013 to serve as an empowerment tool for women in the Rutile mining communities.
Augusta Massah Nuwomah, founder and Chief Executive Officer of WIFEE, said the VSL’s role has come to transcend just financial contribution. She said it has become a peer group where members share their problems and counsel each other on societal and domestic issues affecting their lives. This has come in handy for one of WIFEE’s thematic areas – gender and sexual based violence - as victims have had a place to share their experiences and get peer counselling and advice on ways of seeking redress. The women have worked together to demand justice for their members or relatives of their members where they realized reluctance on the part of the authorities to dispense justice.
“The group members also serve as ambassadors to other women in the mines sector, that all is not lost,” said Ms Nuwomah.
WIFEE has since gone ahead to established VSLs in four clusters, two each in the Imperi and Lowweer Banta chiefdoms. Each cluster is associated with a village, but in some cases members of a cluster come from different villages.
The Gangama VSL, to which Ayi Gloria belongs, was the pioneer group, starting with a membership of 35 women and currently boasts of 50 members.
The VSL project was briefly interrupted between 2014 and 2016, due to the Ebola outbreak that ravaged Sierra Leone and its neighbors Liberia and Guinea. A brief feud ensued when some members of the Gangama VSL demanded that what little cash they had contributed at the time be shared. But thanks to the insistence of Nuwomah, the money remained untouched. She said since the revival of the scheme in 2016, following the end of the viral epidemic, contributions have continued.
As of the first week of November 2018, cash at hand for the Gangama VSL was Le 5.5 million.
“That’s a huge amount of money for a deprived community like this where Le10, 000 is a fortune,” said Nuwomah.
Mariama Hassan is the Chairlady of the Gangama cluster. She explained that eligible members are entitled to loan a minimum of Le100, 000, for which a 20 percent (Le10, 000) interest is charged per month. A debtor has three months to service the loan before they are entitled to another loan.
Ms Hassan said the scheme has had life changing impact on their members, who have been able to take care of their children’s school and help supplement their husbands’ income to provide food in the home. She added that this has also reduced the potential for tension in many families that have battled the threat of disunity as a consequence of abject poverty.
According to her, some of her members only started feeling like humans after the formation of the VSL.
“We have suffered a lot. Our only source of survival before now was cassava farming,” Hassan said, noting that what little they got through selling either raw or boiled cassava hardly made any difference in terms of upkeep of their families, pushing many of the women into extra-marital affairs with mine workers.
Patrick Tuahima has a perfect idea about the life-changing impact of the VSL, as husband to one of the 35 women in the Gangama VSL group. Mr Tuahima also has a fair share of the experience shouldering the burden of running a family without a job.
“This is the greatest disappointment in the Rutile community,” he said, referring to the vexing issue of joblessness among indigenes in spite of the role of the company in their impoverishment.
Patrick’s wife, Asiatu Tuahima, first took a Le100, 000 loan in September 2018 which has since been repaid. They are currently servicing her second Le100, 000 loan taken in December the same year.
Patrick said they used the money to invest in their cassava farm by cultivating more acres. Part of the money was also spent in a backyard gardening which he said they use to supplement their income.
“I am feeling so happy because at first my wife used to make so many demands that I couldn’t meet. But today, it is a different story because of this village savings and loan scheme,” he said.
For many other members, the VSL is the lifeblood of their livelihood. For such people, petty trading is the only way out, as cassava farming has over the years become less attractive, thanks to the impact of unknown chemicals on the soil by Sierra Rutile’s mining activities.
Ms Gloria recalls when fishing was the major economic activity at Old Gangama. She said the fact that the activities of Sierra Rutile have led to the destruction of those lands, which forced them into cassava cultivation, which she said hardly pays these days. She too relies on petty trading.
Mohamed T. Massaquoi contributed to this report, which was done in collaboration with the National Advocacy Coalition on Extractive and the Open Society Initiative for West Africa.
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