Today we divided up. I went to film a loan collection with SEED and to interview Edwin from Space while Anna Louisa went to do an interview at the Virlanie Foundation.
SEED in Cavitas.
The loan officer was a handsome young man who used a motorbike to get around, which I was lucky enough to get a lift on. He was collecting loans from a small group of women who had taken out individual loans of around 1000 – 1500 pesos and were all repaying varying amounts. They were mostly small-scale retailers and this was their second loan cycle. The ladies were all full of beans, very funny and alert and certainly seemed to be benefiting from and delighted by the service. They claimed they were better at managing money than their husbands, who were, they declared laughing, ‘full of vice.’
At Virlanie, Anna-Louisa interviewed social worker Mildred Malate about the case of 18 month old Leanne. The intention had been to interview Leanne’s mother but on entering Virlanie’s mother and baby unit, it transpired that she was a mute, who had herself grown up in Virlanie’s disability home. She then became a prostitute. Leanne is the product of a liaison with a Canadian client. The Canadian has nothing to do with either Leanne or her mother. Virlanie are now trying to have Leanne declared as abandoned by both her parents so that they can put her up for adoption. With her father absent and her mother unable to care for her, Leanne’s story is sadly typical.
Back in Cavitas, I have finished filming and now I “speed” back into the city (an hour’s taxi journey) to the very lush Manila Peninsula hotel so that we could meet Lizzie Zobel and her assistant, Clarissa, for an introduction to ‘Readers Transform’, a programme that helps to provide books to schools and to train teachers to help students read more. The point here is that literacy is the ability to spell out the letters that make up a word, but that comprehension is the ability to understand what is written and in the Philippines, 11% of school students have very low comprehension levels. Four years ago, grade 6 students were tested: of the 1.2 million students tested who were supposed to have ‘high school readiness’ only 8000 students passed.
Lizzie and her partner thought that the cheapest form of intervention to improve basic comprehension was to increase reading – as she puts it, “to transform from children learning to read, into children reading to learn”. Her Sa Aklat Sisikat Foundation intervenes at different levels in order to create a classroom full of readers. They have teacher training programmes funded by the Philippines International schools and distance teacher training which is a pilot project run in partnership with the Boy Scouts of the Philippines. Once teachers have been trained, 60-80 books are delivered to their classrooms and students are monitored for the next two years.
Today we are seeing the Inner City Development Corporation (ICDC) in Quezon City, where the University of Manila is based. It is an upcoming area, but one of the worst hit by the typhoon in 2008. As usual when visiting an EDM partner we take local transport: in this instance, an unairconditioned train jampacked with people which takes us to EDM’s director, Frank Renaudin. He meets us on the platform and then we share a tricycle rickshaw for the last leg of the journey.
The children’s saving programme has got 1,200 children saving at least 1 peso a day from the age of 6 to13. The money is deposited in a special savings account gathering 7% interest /year. They can withdraw their money at any time, but only from 1-2 pesos every day. Mothers often follow their children’s example and start saving, but other times they come to raid their child’s bank account as they cannot pay a bill.
Eventually we leave, still shaken by what we stumbled upon. Zeny lightens the mood by taking us to the Memorial Services Shop. We admire her range of 9 coffins, all made of different material, varying in price. Often she manages to recycle the coffins, which helps to offer the poor cheaper funerals – that and their donated Volvo hearse. They tell us how the memorial shop was flooded to the ceiling in the 2009 typhoon and how they had to buy everything again. Zeny explains the reasons she started a ‘low-cost funeral business’: ‘it is, she says dramatically, ‘very expensive to die in the Philippines.’ Funerals cost a lot, although they do not need to.
We come across another white coffin. This time it belongs to a 17 year old girl who fell ill after the typhoon and was in hospital a long time. As before, there are a few tables drawn up with men silently playing cards.
We get in a taxi to ‘Smokey Mountain’ a former rubbish dump site alongside which a slum has grown up. This is the Tondo district: one of the poorest in Manila. We are joining Entrepreneurs du Monde (EdM), a French NGO specialising in microfinance, on a visit to their local partner,‘Uplift’.
We meet our first microcredit clients (EdM calls them partners), both owners of tiny convenience shops – ‘sari sari’ stalls. In both cases, the loans are for 5,000 pesos, (around £63) to buy products. There is no bookkeeping material in one shop – the ‘sales invoices’ were square pieces of paper with amounts pierced onto a nail in the corner and a rolled-up, ink-smudged list turned out to be his bill for goods from the shopping mall. Uplift’s Livelihood and Development officer explained that the shopkeeper is a new borrower and that he should and would be keeping accounts, but that meanwhile that they knew and trusted him. It is clear that social capital and character analysis figures highly in the risk assessment performed by these tiny MFIs.
at and drink. This would enable the family to raise the money to pay for the funeral (PHP 50,000, around £700).