Gathering ideas

[Victoria Robson]

I’m struggling to think of when, in my working life as a financial journalist here in Dubai, I’ve come across a locally-based micro finance initiative. There is a women's weaving project sponsored by the Khalifa Fund for Enterprise Development which sold its handicrafts at the Abu Dhabi Book Fare earlier this year. But apart from that, there doesn’t seem - to me at least - to be too many projects targeted at helping local, low income women to better their lives by reaping the fruits of commercial enterprise.

Women in business in the Gulf usually means big, family-owned business. Pairing women and commerce brings to mind female figureheads like Lubna Olayan who is the CEO of Saudi Arabia’s Olayan Finance Company, Dubai's Raja Al-Gurg, who heads up Easa Saleh Al-Gurg Group, or Abu Dhabi’s Fatima Al-Jaber, COO of Al-Jaber Group.

And on the flip-side, there is the as-yet unused female commercial potential. According to asset managers, there is a deep pool of untapped wealth held by a collective of cash-rich, high net worth women in the Gulf. Back in the boom time, there was a surge in private banker efforts to convince these ladies to pull their cash out from under their mattresses and put their money to work.

This much-talked about group, it seems to me, could be a well-spring of financial support for small-scale, entrepreneurial projects set up for the benefit of other women physically down the road but economically a million miles away.

In the meantime, we have blossoming initiatives like Mena Microfinance for Women. Meeting the project’s founder, sponsor and all-round champion Geetha is to encounter professional financial acumen teamed with an empathetic heart. With this project, she has managed to put into action what many of us hanker after the opportunity to do - to help other people in a meaningful and effective way, to give back a little in return for what we have been blessed with living in Dubai.

The scheme will provide sewing machines and instruction to a group of 10 already indentified local women who will make and sell abayas, indoor dresses and hair accessories to supplement their income. Eventually, the goal is to gather these individual seamstresses into a busy, self-sustaining co-operative.

Right now, MMFW is marshalling resources, looking for its own financing, buying the sewing machines and arranging for the women to learn to sew. Among the skills MMFW needs to find are women who can use a sewing machine and help guide the new seamstresses and those that can teach the women how to keep a basic book of accounts. In the future, as the project becomes more established, it will need a lot more support.

Talking with Geetha, it became apparent that there is lots of interest in volunteering to help MMFW. But some would-be helping hands prefer to wait in the wings at this early stage.

If my own experience is anything to go by, I think often people want to help out but they don’t know how and they aren’t sure what skills they have to offer and worry that they might instead just get in the way. In the early stages of a project, it’s hard for a willing volunteer looking in to identify where they might be needed and it’s easier to stand back and save your energies for a later time when roles are more defined.

However, MMFW needs our creative input now. It is young and as it takes shape in an environment that is not an established home to microfinance, Geetha says any ideas and thoughts about how the project could best work or alternative ways of doing things would be much appreciated. As her previous post on cultural sensitivities points out, every step along the way to establishing a viable enterprise that will make a difference to individual women’s lives, is a step up the learning curve .

I don’t know much about successful micro-finance models and I can’t sew, so I’ve decided to do some research to generate some ideas and raise a bit of awareness about what MMFW is trying to achieve. A quick google for MENA micro finance reveals there is a lot of material out there to read. I’ll let you know what I find.