Learning to be Providers: the Women of Senegal
10 February 2003
Many women in Senegal must go beyond the caregiver role to act as sole provider for their families. To succeed, they must learn business skills and expand their markets and opportunities.
by Jenny Wilder, Deputy Director, Communications and Education
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| Mme. Camille Fall relies on selling herbs to support her family, which includes 17 children. By: Jenny Wilder/ Oxfam |
Mme. Camille Fall is the sole provider for 17 children in a sprawling impoverished neighborhood just outside of Dakar, Senegal. When her husband died, she had to provide for her own six children; and took in even more when her husband’s second wife died. Mme. Fall makes her living selling herbs used in cooking. She can’t leave her home and go to the main market, as she has to watch her children, so she sells just outside her house on the street.
Mme. Fall is working to create a larger margin of profit. As she says, “Sometimes women ask me for credit, but if I give two people credit in one day, I have no profit and cannot buy more herbs for the next day.”
Mme. Fall is a member of RAFET (Reseau Africain pour la Promotion de la Femme Travailleuse, or the African Network for the Promotion of Working Women), an Oxfam-supported organization that helps women like her to earn and save money and to gain access to social services. Most of these workers are not well educated, and struggle to be recognized by Senegalese society as the head of their household. RAFET offers them training in reading and basic mathematics, and helps them learn how to organize their businesses and ensure a profit. RAFET makes small loans available to them (which would otherwise only be available from local moneylenders at a 200% interest rate), which they use to expand their businesses and improve their income.
Mme. Fall cannot qualify for public services such as health care because her business is not officially recognized by the government. RAFET provides invaluable information about how to overcome such obstacles, and lobbies the government to provide social services to women working outside the mainstream, formal parts of the economy. RAFET brings women like Mme. Fall together to create a strong social and financial network of small business owners who learn from and support one another to grow stronger. The women in RAFET are inspired and energized as they learn to make good decisions for themselves and their families, increase their earnings, and track and save their profits. As they learn how to promote their businesses and accommodate their customers, they expand their markets and income. As Mme. Amsatou Sidibe Sow, RAFET’s president points out, the greatest change in these women’s lives is that, “They become the main actors in their own progress. This is true empowerment of women.”
