Fidela Ebuk

Fidela Ebuk is building a health-oriented rural women's savings and loan movement from among the widespread traditional women's saving groups known as Osusu.

Since the 1980s, microcredit explosion throughout the developing world, many have worked to scale up widespread African traditional local savings associations with mixed results. Fidela Ebuk has developed an original and effective approach that scales up women's savings through small-scale business credit, but with a distinctive twist. Fidela's savings and credit projects are geared heavily toward promoting community health. This health orientation anchors two fundamental dynamics of her approach. First, it provides the vision that unites the women around a community-wide objective (as distinct from the individual objective) at the core of the traditional savings group. Second, it contains a number of specific economic activities such as health insurance and bulk medicine purchasing that provide tangible benefits to individual members and communities almost immediately.
Fidela's approach is designed to spread throughout West Africa, where rural women have a long-demonstrated capacity to save and are often resentful of a succession of failed government development programs that they have been forced to finance through taxes on their savings. At the heart of Fidela's approach is a simple message: You can invest your savings to improve community health far more effectively than the government. Along with the message, she brings the know-how.
Under the banner of Fidela's organization, the Women's Health and Economic Development Association, aggregations of women's savings clubs have undertaken a wide range of health and income generating activities, including a sanitation campaign for cleaner latrines and kitchens, a coconut fiber workshop, a deworming project, a cassava processing venture, oral rehydration traning, a traditional weaving center, immunization campaigns, a soap-making enterprise, treatment of malaria and hypertension, body-cream manufacture and a mutual health insurance scheme.

Development needs in rural Nigeria are urgent. In the area of health, for example, only forty percent of Nigerians have reasonable access to health care. Effective distribution channels for drugs and medical supplies are rare, and widespread poverty further reduces access to resources for maintaining health and treating illnesses. A rural literacy rate of only twenty percent and a strong attachment to traditional beliefs and practices suggest the inappropriateness of development models dependent on modern infrastructure, consistent lines of administration and high literacy rates.
Yet this is precisely the development model that has prevailed since independence over 30 years ago. Programs to address development needs are typically large in scale and administered in a centralized, top-down manner by the government. Alternatively, foreign development agencies may interject funds and expertise, but despite the prevailing "community participation" rhetoric, the preponderance of these interventions remain exogenous in their character. Whether private or governmental, development projects and campaigns are premised on a series of links–of knowledge, infrastructure, administration–that in practice rarely, if ever, exist.
The tragic irony of Nigerian development is that, despite its exogenous model, it has successfully extracted finance and cooperation from the local level for its implementation. Subsequently, when projects fail–as they do almost without exception–rural women are left feeling exploited.
A typical government project to bring electricity to a rural village, for example, will involve high capital investments in laying cable from a distant electric power source to the village. To pay its share of the costs, the village will tax its citizens and its related village associations in the cities. The women's Osusu groups are taxed as well. The money is spent but is exhausted long before the project is completed. Other funds not being available, the project remains unfinished and citizen contributions are lost.
Alternatively, the women's groups alone could raise enough money to secure a loan to purchase a generator capable of providing electricity to the village. This option has not been effectively presented to the women before now.

Fidela's strategy marries two elements: the women's Osusu savings infrastructure with a growing resentment of government corruption and incompetence. She brings the women a package of services and ideas that include a vision of community health and training, and models for developing aggregated mutual savings and lending initiatives.
The Association has evolved considerably since Fidela founded it in 1988 in the Akwa Ibom State, where it began with health education for rural women. Working primarily with Osusu cooperative societies, Fidela trained women to engage in preventive health care for themselves and their children. Responding to their need for financial independence, she quickly began to develop techniques to help women better manage their funds. Over the following five years, she developed training programs in leadership, administration, the formal banking system, and effective management of small enterprises. She has also developed a mutual savings and loan structure and a menu of health projects that members may initiate alongside business ventures.
The Association's loan capital comes from contributions by cooperative members, usually by amalgamating a number of Osusu groups. Members contribute a small amount of money, which can be reclaimed by the contributor in the form of a loan. These cooperative funds also cover the costs of each community's health programs.
Each Association chapter manages its own loan fund and, in addition to lending to the business ventures of its members, must also initiate health projects. Virtually all chapters opt to set up the health insurance program, under which a participating member requiring hospitalization can obtain a no-interest loan to cover hospital costs and is given a three-to-four month grace period for convalescence before she must begin repayment. If she fails to repay the loan on schedule, she must begin making interest payments. If she is still unable to pay, then she must make some of her land available to the Association to farm cooperatively. After three years of such loans, there is has not been a single default. Another popular health option for Association chapters involves bulk discount purchasing of drugs or other medical supplies.
The Association's secretariat conducts workshops for chapters to ensure effective and widespread awareness about and participation in each program. One particularly successful program, for traditional birth attendants, dealt with care of pregnant women, hygienic delivery, and when to refer difficult cases to a hospital. The workshop resulted in a high demand for hygienic birth kits, and invitations to conduct similar workshops in other places.
Fidela has deliberately expanded the Association slowly, as she believes that the model is not yet ready for rapid national replication. There are presently more than 200 member chapters in four states participating in the Association. Each group has anywhere from 20 to more than 100 members. Before any chapter can become a full member, it must serve as an associate member for a trial period of six months to be sure its members understand the rights and responsibilities of membership and are willing to comply.

Fidela originally trained as a teacher to please her husband. She left teaching, however, in 1975 to pursue her lifelong dream of becoming a nurse. She completed her training and became a public health nursing sister.
Fidela's participation in the mid-1980's in the government's "Better Life for Rural People" program, which focused on income-generation and health care, convinced her that she could do more if she worked independently with rural women who were ill-served (if served at all) by the campaign. She subsequently resigned from her public health position to pursue her own approach.
She has been made a chief in her local area, an honor which confirms the esteem in which she is held by men and women alike and adds credibility to her position as a founder and director of a nongovernmental organization. She has also attended the World Social Summit in Denmark in March 1995, where she co-chaired a caucus on the rights of children. She also represented Nigeria's nongovernmental organization movement at the 1995 World Conference on Women in Beijing.