Marcia's Story

We traveled back to Katmandu and met Marcia, full of ques­tions about her WEP program design and the decisions that went into it. As we discussed the program details with her, we learned that many of WEP’s most creative aspects were the result of innovations that Marcia, Achyut Hari Aryal (WEP’s microfinance specialist), and many others on Marcia’s staff had developed when presented with obstacles by those who doubted she could accomplish what she set out to do.

In 1998, Pact received a $5 million grant from USAID to form microfinance groups. Marcia, as the project’s field director, decided they could use Pact’s existing literacy and other community-based groups to act as a platform for the microfinance project by introducing and linking these exist­ing groups to external credit. Her team conducted a feasibil­ity study that surveyed the one thousand local organizations implementing Pact’s projects in Nepal and concluded that a potential market existed for credit of 350,000 women. She limited this number to those the Asia Foundation had the capacity to train in empowerment and advocacy, a total of 120,000 group members.

She was confident she could reach this number based on two facts. First, Pact was already delivering literacy training through a thousand local Nepalese NGOs, so she knew Pact had the capacity to reach scale. Second, and more impor­tantly, she had learned something interesting about some of these groups. Members of several literacy groups had taken advantage of the regular meetings to do some financial trans­actions on the side. They had organized themselves into dikutis—a type of ROSCA common in Nepal, to which each member contributed a set amount of money each meeting, in turns taking the total collection from that meeting home with her. In Marcia’s mind, it would not be hard to add on to what the women were already doing.

Without an MFI to provide credit immediately, Mar­cia figured she could at least start the process and deal with loan capital later. While the groups were waiting to connect to external credit, they operated as savings groups, making loans to one another from the communal pot of weekly sav­ings and sharing interest earned from the loans. Despite Mar­cia’s best efforts, no MFIs came forward to bring her groups credit. She decided to continue with the plan anyway, form­ing more and more savings groups independent of MFIs. WEP was born.