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.

ICDC was founded by Zeny de Jesus in 2005. She was a social worker who had managed to revolutionise the sale of handicrafts by getting rid of the middle man. She also founded a tricycle business, trained in microfinance and worked for CCT until she felt they were too big for her, so she founded a Co-operative. She is also a local councillor and the area has around 20,000 voters.

ICDC has a staff of 22, of whom 12 are field officers. Its principal operation is in loans plus savings with a special savings programme for children, but it also generates additional income through a low-cost funeral business.

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.

After lunch, Zeny is eager to show us her low cost funeral business. We are unprepared and walk into what we think is a memorial showroom with a showcase coffin and a model inside it.

This is not the case. Inside the open casket coffin lies the corpse of a 51 year old man, his face heavily made up, who has committed suicide 2 days ago. His widow sits in white shorts and a t-shirt besides the coffin, her face expressionless. We sit on a floral sofa less than a metre away from the white and gold coffin. Relatives offer us brimming glasses of coca cola and slices of white bread. Children run in and out and peer at us. Zeny talks to the widow as we tactfully try to ascertain why he killed himself. He hung himself and left a suicide note, which we are shown: ‘Forgive me, but the problems were too much to bear’.

Entrepreneurs du Monde have heard rumours that this man was deeply in debt to at least 4 Microfinance institutions and a loan shark. To us, his widow says they had no debts. I ask what his job was: his previous boss ran a cock fighting business. A gambler. One reason for debts begins to show. It also explains all the caged cockerels we’ve seen in slum allotment areas. After some more conversation it transpires that he had asked relatives to lend him 15,000 pesos recently. He had stomach pains. Perhaps he was depressed. His photograph by the coffin is of a handsome, peaceful-looking man.

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.

Frank and Zeny then take us on a short stroll through some of the worse slums we have yet seen. It is everything one imagines a slum to be, including the open drains, which do not look so awful until you get closer and see how clogged with rubbish they are. Half-clad children chase after us, one small boy  bullies a kitten,  neatly pegged washing flaps and twists in the wind.

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 visit the home of Evelyn Baluyot who makes ‘rags’ for tricycle drivers. Rags are round multi-coloured cloths which the drivers use to wipe down their faces and their vehicles, especially during the rainy season. She uses her loan to buy remnants from a factory and sews the rags on a manual sewing machine. She sells a pack of 24 for 20 pesos and makes around 100 pesos a day. Her loan requires her to pay 300 pesos a week back. She is very sad as she lost 2 of her 4 children in the typhoon. She and her husband and the remaining children all live together in what looks to be about 4 square metres.

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’.

In Tondo, there are about 1,000 families living in government-built temporary housing. People live in vast warehouse constructions built on two floors, with children and chickens running around, people cooking and selling food and a very loud jukebox blaring love songs into the sunshine. Official plans to convert these temporary homes into permanent housing never happened.

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.

These loans are for 3 months with a 3% monthly interest rate and a weekly pay-back scheme. One shopkeeper is so happy with her loan she is already keen to take out another.

Walking on, we see a tiny white coffin and a makeshift shrine with an empty table and chairs planted in front of it. Frank, the director of EdM, explains that the chairs are there for people to come and pay to play cards and eat and drink. This would enable the family to raise the money to pay for the funeral (PHP 50,000, around £700).

Lunch is in a fast food place where the French fries were particularly and oddly delicious accompanied by rather more murky package soup. High blood pressure, diabetes and cholesterol are common ailments suffered by Filipinos: their love of fast food one of the legacies of the American occupation.

We then proceed by jeepney –  buses converted from American army jeeps – to Navotas to visit Uplift’s  San Jose branch who were holding an orientation session for new partners. Around 26 women were crammed into the room, fanning themselves and listening while the Livelihood and Development officers explained how borrowing money and repaying it works