Chididi Women's Savings & Capital Building

A Surcod Project

Surcod has received funding from Volkart Vision an organisation based in Winterthur in Switzerland, for the Chididi Women Savings and Capital Building Project.

This project is an initiative of SURCOD to support the Women of Chididi to start Saving Groups with an aim of raising up their capital which will lead to the establishment of fruit processing factory.

Volkart Vision will support with the funding for capacity building, payment of field Officers who will be responsible for supervising the groups as well as the provision of seed money for the seting up the processing unit for fruit processing.

SURCOD hand in hand with the concerned departments in the Malawi government, such as the Ministry of Agriculture and food security and the Ministry of Gender and Community Development is facilitating the process.

OBJECTIVES OF THE PROJECT

The project is designed to achieve the following objectives:

1. To reduce poverty which is very common amongst Chididi women due to much dependency upon men for their income.
2. To build the capacity of poor women in capital building skills, production skills and entrepreneurship.
3. To diversify family income through the combination of capital building skills, production skills, entrepreneurship skills and farming as a poverty reduction strategy.
4. To reduce gender based violence which is caused due to much dependency on men as their main source of income.
5. To encourage sharing of ideas between women as they will be engaged in group business.
6. To promote family planning since the time spent with men will be reduced.
7. To train 300 women in business management and various production technologies.

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A DAY WITH THE TISUNGANE WOMEN GROUP

"You know women were regarded as children manufacturer and kitchen queens.This is what we grew up with. This made us weak and insecure.

But today with the coming of SURCOD our organisation, the story is different.

We have begun to understand ourselves that we can also contribute to the development of our families as well as to the development of our villages or even beyond as leaders.

Because of this self understanding obstacles standing our way will soon develop wings.

Our guests and all people that are here, it is my belief that sooner we will parade with men alongside each other sharing ideas to develop our families as well as our nation since as SURCOD women groups we are learning a lot of things as we meet every week with the volunteers who enlightens us with various development topics.

When we meet we discuss a number of issues starting from home management, family planning, gender, savings, businesses, environmental issues and not forgetting family development as our core mission to eradicate poverty in our homes.

We have managed to contribute and save MWK6800 ($46.26) in our group for only two months and we are very sure that by the end of this year we will save over MK40800 ($277.55).

All this has come along under the wings of SURCOD which is promoting the saving spirit and women leadership amongst us the rural women in Chididi, as it is building our capacity in entrepreneurship in our groups which we democratically formed.

We elected our leaders democratically but SURCOD only guided us on good leadership. We drafted our by-laws to guide us through and we were developing them together as women groups and we endorsed them to show that we are conforming to them.

We meet every fortnight at here under the Kachere tree to discuss savings and capital building with SURCOD representative where they train us in various business concepts, savings skill and capital building.

The main focus is alleviating poverty; keeping money to build capital for a tangible investment which we are still thinking of as Chididi women but mind you we value much our fruits we have here which we always sell at a robbed price at Nsanje Boma.

( Read More: A Day With The Tisungane Women's Group )