Back to the Future: Gender, Ethnicity & The Informal Finance Options – Any Lessons from the Annual August Meetings of Igbo Women?

Setting the Scene to the Drama of Disadvantage

As I reflected upon this article, the farthest thing on my mind was to review articles from the media, but I could resist the temptation to highlight this eloquently documented piece by Christiana Nwaogu entitled “Igbo Women And The August Meeting Festival”. This is because it provides some context on the point of this article – i.e. the alternative finance options for a marginalised group: women, ethnicity and informality.

As Nwaogu points out in a recent article:

Across Igbo land, August Meeting, the annual mothers’ congresses held in the month of August, usually witnesses massive home-coming of ‘Igbo women’ to their marital rural hometowns, where they unite with their rural-based colleagues for community development purposes. Despite negative commentaries about hosting or attending these meetings, the buzz is still as loud today as it was many years ago…”

Ten years on from my 2010 academic paper, yes that “buzz is still as loud today.” It is a right of passage and a pragmatic alternative to the micro-credit disadvantage of well-meaning, value-adding, but yet marginalised group. The marginalisation that I dare refer to cuts across gender, ethnicity and informality.

I would not bore you with the academic or scholarly discourse, but would rather focus on the cultural imperatives and policy implications of the article I published about a decade ago with a colleague on the ground in Awka, the capital city of Anambra State of Nigeria, which also happens to be the research context of the study.

Back to the Future

It might have been about a decade since my co-author and I published this article entitled “Micro-credit for microenterprises? A study of women “petty” traders in Eastern Nigeria,” but regrettably not much has changed since then. The bottlenecks remain the same, and the alternative finance arrangements seem to be getting stronger in the face of difficulties accessing mainstream funding for arguably “low-value” projects/ businesses.

At this point, it I think it is about time we moved on to the main gist of that decade-old study. The purpose was to examine the factors that constrain women petty traders’ access to microcredit, and to highlight the ‘arguably’ innovative measures these women had initiated in order to counter these constraints.

Based on in-depth interviews with women micro-entrepreneurs drawn from a convenience sample of 20 petty traders in the market town of Awka – the capital of a state in Eastern Nigeria, the study identified three main constraints – internal, socio-cultural and policy induced – as the key moderating influences on women petty traders’ ability access to micro-credit.

In broad terms, we posited that the lack of access to credit tended to perpetuate market exclusion, and deepen the socioeconomic and political vulnerability of women as a consequence. Such vulnerability has prompted these microentrepreneurs into venturing to alternative sources of credit in the form of “Women August Meetings”.

This is where Nwaogu’s article has confirmatory resonance. Coming back to Nwaogu’s article at this juncture, it is worth highlighting the following commentary:

The ‘August Meeting’ has a critical mandate in Igbo political affairs and represents the socio-economic and cultural development initiative of women. Indeed, this feast truly has typified the rise of women as a social force and their conscious pursuit of development.”

The ’critical mandate’ in that article reinforces our point about a decade ago, which highlighted implications for public policy support geared towards “leveraging” and mainstreaming these kinds of finance initiatives to ensure maximum reach.

It also provides evidence that corroborate similar findings in other contexts, notably Kenya in a recent article entitled “Why Kenya financial sector’s push towards social finance is beneficial in the long term.”

Moving Forward – what next?

The sum up, there are both theoretical and practical implications linked to this article and in the light of new evidence.

Theoretical, and rather regrettably, previous studies (up to  2009/2010 when this manuscript was published) in the area of access to micro-credit have paid limited attention to the peculiar challenges of this segment of society, i.e. petty traders (mostly micro, informal and self-employed) and their contributions to the wider economy.

Practically, or from a policy perspective, there is a need to reach out to members of the national/ state chapters of these August Meetings to discuss and accommodate the needs of their members into a holistic framework that would enable the mainstreaming of their economic contributions – past, present, and future – to the economic development of the country. Informality does not equate to illegality, a platform for voices to be heard would go a long way in persuading the formalisation of the informal sector to the better of the economy. Needless to add that this demonstrates a level of inclusivity that could be perceived as a win-win situation for all groups, with the government being the most impoverished in terms of social capital.

 

About the Author:

Nnamdi O. Madichie is Professor of Marketing and Entrepreneurship at the University of Kigali, Rwanda. His research interests straddle broad areas of marketing and entrepreneurship (ethnic, gender and diasporic). He is author of “Micro-credit for microenterprises? A study of women “petty” traders in Eastern Nigeria” as well as the award winning article entitled “Cultural determinants of entrepreneurial emergence in a typical sub-Sahara African context.” Professor Madichie is also Visiting Professor at the Unizik Business School, Awka, Nigeria, Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing (FCIM) and Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA). He is also past editor of the African Journal of Business and Economic Research (AJBER) published by Adonis & Abbey. He can be contacted at: nmadichie@uok.ac.rw

 

 

 

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