2024 Community Celebrations

Preparing for the Big Day

WMI’s annual community celebration is one of the highlights of the year not just in the village of Buyobo or Sironko District, but throughout the entire Mbale town region in Eastern Uganda. It is a chance for the entire network of WMI supporters, from our staff and officers to local leaders, to government officials and of course the businesswomen in the loan program, to come together and celebrate their triumphs and discuss their impact on reducing household poverty.

The ladies spend the good part of a week preparing for the event. They organize all the festivities themselves: cleaning, setting up, cooking, and getting ready long into the night.

Putting on an event for 1,000 attendees in a rural village requires deft organizational abilities. Watching the teams of women work together is like watching a team of Olympic synchronized swimmers execute precise moves in perfect harmony – only the WMI teams are wielding sharp machetes to slice bogoyas and stirring boiling cauldrons of green bananas to make matoke.

Their camaraderie reinforces their personal bonds and their shared experience strengthens their ability to run a smoothly functioning village-level organization. Every picture tells a story and there are so many conveyed in the faces of the team that makes WMI’s work possible.

Enjoying the Festivities

Each year WMI and our local partners host a community celebration at our headquarters to honor the women in the loan program and to appreciate all of the villagers, elders, local leaders, and government officials who contribute to making it a success. The brass band led a rowdy contingent of businesswomen on a two-mile march down the main road to applause and cheers from villagers, who lined the banks of the road. Speeches, poems, songs and dance filled the day. Local Director, Olive Wolimbwa, led the festivities, ably assisted by Assistant Local Director, Jackie Namonye, who introduced speakers and simultaneously translated from Ligisu into English and vice versa.

Guests included loan hub leaders from El Doret, Kenya and the best savers in the loan groups there. The ladies took an 8-hour bus ride to travel to Buyobo for the event and spend time with our leadership team, who are mentoring the El Doret ladies as they expand their loan hub.

Stephen Mukweli, former managing director of Postbank Uganda gave a riveting speech that congratulated WMI for is vision of empowering rural women:

 “If you want to create an impact, choose the less privileged as a team to work with. We thank you for your wonderful vision for choosing the less privileged rural women to manage the loan program and for the great social and economic transformation WMI has brought. WMI is all about rural women”.

Buyobo Business Growth

With the expansion of the WMI compound, women are opening new businesses at the Buyobo crossroads. Small brick buildings now line the main streets of the village. Traders routinely stop at the center of town to load bananas, vegetables and other produce on their trucks heading to the north and west of the country.

Mobile money vendors, hairdressers and other service providers are catering to increasing numbers of customers drawn to this vibrant corridor of commerce.

Visiting Senior Loan Groups Surrounding Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in Kenya

The women in central Kenya formed self-help groups for a host of distinct reasons and found a path to the WMI loan program in different ways.

Neema Group (meaning Grace) was started by local village women in 2004 to respond to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Many children in the area lost their parents and the ladies acted as guardians for the orphans. They supported one another and accessed a Save the Children program that provided education and nutritional supplements for the children for five years. 

When that program ended the Neema Group stayed together and members started contributing regularly to a group savings pool, lending the funds to members on a rotating basis (table banking). The loans are used for small, short-term expenses and paid back each month. In 2009, Neema Group applied to become part of the WMI/Lewa microfinance initiative and with excellent internal governance and a good savings culture they were accepted into the loan program.



Members have never missed a repayment deadline since joining the loan program. They manage their individual businesses but continue to co-operate in joint ventures like potato farming. They hired a shamba (farmland) as a group and are growing Irish potatoes. At harvest they will earn about $2,000. They will use the money to pay school fees and buy supplies for the orphans they still support. If there are any funds left over, they will use them for their internal table banking loans.

Jamarose

One of the members of Neema Group is Jamarose.  She is married and has six children, aged one and a half to eighteen. She is an onion farmer. Each harvest can yield 3,000-5,000 kilos of onions which sell for 50 cents a kilo at market. She can also store them in her root cellar and wait until prices rise if she does not want to sell them directly after harvesting. She usually plants three crops a year.

Lewa provides inputs and seeds for each planting as well as ongoing agricultural training sessions. Fake seeds are a big problem in East Africa and farmers must be exceedingly careful not to be duped into buying them.

Jamarose also grows corn which is harvested at a different time of the year than onions. This way she generates a steady income stream.

With income from the farm Jamarose bought a cow which she uses for milk for her family. The cow is expecting and she will sell the calf and reinvest the profits in the farm. With past savings she was able to build her own house. Right now she is saving to send her oldest daughter to University.

Tanzania Loan Hubs Expand: Businesses Diversify

Tloma, TZ



The staff of our Tloma, Tanzania loan hub serves villages surrounding the town of Karatu. They have been providing excellent financial management and training support for the women in the loan program.

In December, the executive team at our headquarters in Buyobo, Uganda traveled to Tanzania to provide a two-day workshop of advanced training for the Tloma staff.

As a result of the dedicated leadership here, businesses in the area are growing and diversiying. Women are making and selling more "value added" products and entering new sectors like infomation technology.

This evolution and progress is very exciting - it energizes this loan hub and the ladies are determined to achieve even greater business successes. We visited numerous businesses and several women shared details of their business journey with us:

Anakleta Joseph, age 44, runs a shop and roadside diner in Tloma village called The Tembo. She is open from 8 am - 10 pm.

She started with her first loan in 2013. Since then she has expanded her current operations and is looking to open a second location right in town. Her husband helps her with the business (and she added that he does not get paid). She plans for each of them to run one of the shops.

One popular item in her shop is milk. Youngsters from the surrounding area troop to the store with pint and quart bottles that she washes assiduously and then fills with fresh milk from her refrigerator. She has a cow and sells her own dairy products but also buys additional supplies in town because there is such strong demand.

With five children ranging in age from four to twenty-three, Anakleta used her business profits primarily to pay school fees. Now that her older children are working, she has been able to shift some of her profits to completing construction of a brick house for her family.

Matilda Felix Shirma runs an internet café and stationary store in Karatu. She took her first loan in 2019 and established her business in 2020.

With four computers online the café does brisk business. Buying the computers one by one she learned how to negotiate and what to look for – especially after getting stuck with a new purchase that had no hard drive. Every three months she services them. For tricky problems she has an IT expert on call but over the years has learned to fix most Windows glitches herself by watching YouTube tutorials.

Keeping meticulous books allows Matilda to track her finances carefully. She budgets rent and other expenses and always makes sure she is deducting all her overhead before calculating her profit. She saves monthly and wants to shift from retail to a wholesale operation where she provides computers and other supplies to small businesses.

Matilda is twenty-eight, married, and has a three-and-a-half-year-old daughter. She is happy to see more young women her age in business for themselves. It is a big change from the prior generation. She likes being independent and knowing that she can support her family on her own if necessary.

Tesha Magdelena Hermani is a farmer. Raising cows and chicks, growing beans and other vegetables, she has diversified her holdings. Tesha started with her first loan in 2016. She has two hectares under cultivation. Right now she has one employee to help her with all the chores.

Prices at the markets rise and fall with the timing of the harvests. When there is a lot of product on the market, prices are low. That is why Tesha stores her beans right after the harvest and holds them until the prices go up again. She tracks all her expenses and has an accurate budget but always has finances rolling around in her head. She is constantly thinking of ways to improve her operations.

A single mom with two children, she uses her profits to pay school fees and support her family. She is proud of the cheerful bright green house with turquoise trim that they call home. With her savings, she intends to add an apartment to her house to rent as there is an ongoing housing shortage in the area and she will generate reliable income from the rental.

Stephen Mukweli Joins WMI Advisory Board

A long-time supporter of WMI, Mr. Stephen Mukweli, former Managing Director of PostBank Uganda, has joined the WMI Advisory Board. Mr. Mukweli is a career banker, over eighteen years of which have been in executive positions. He is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Bankers (England and Wales) and attended the Executive MBA at Middlesex University, UK.

During his tenure at PBU, the bank deepened its outreach to the unbanked through innovative branchless solutions like mobile phone banking and mobile vehicle banking services. His past experience will be invaluable in helping guide WMI’s ongoing loan program expansion.

Prior to joining PBU, Mr. Mukweli served for seven years as CEO of The Uganda Institute of Bankers, during which time he focused on mainstreaming microfinance in the banking profession. He also served as a Chairman of the African Institutes of Bankers, an apex organization for the Banking Institutes in Africa which spear headed professionalizing banking qualification in Africa.

Currently retired, Mr. Mukweli resides in Sironko District, not far from WMI’s headquarters in Buyobo.

Thank You!

The WMI Board of Directors is extremely grateful to our donors - you make WMI's work possible. Thank you for your thoughtfulness and commitment to supporting WMI's program to empower rural women and families in East Africa. You are providing a lifeline that is truly making a difference in reducing global poverty.