Requesting Loans

The president then asked whether anyone would like to take a loan. Three women raised their hands, including Bintou. President Aminata called on her to speak first. Bintou pushed aside the pile of peanuts at her feet and stepped around her basket to stand in the center of the circle.

The president thanked Bintou and asked for the next per­son to speak. Kadija stepped to the middle of the circle. This was the first time Kadija approached the group for a loan; she had been too afraid of the interest charges to ever take one before. She joined the savings group to build a savings account and to take advantage of the interest garnered from the loans of others. She had joined also to handle emergen­cies such as she faced today.

Kadija explained to the group that her husband was very ill, stuck in bed with a fever. He had not been able to work in their millet field for more than a week and had missed a chance to sell a goat at the Soma market. The family was run­ning low on rice and millet stores, and Kadija didn’t have cash to buy more. She requested an emergency loan to buy a bag of grain, to be paid back when her husband recovered. Kadija valued her privacy and her pride, so she hesitated to bring her family’s needs up for group discussion, but she appreci­ated her ability to do so. Her savings group was more dis­creet and reliable than asking her family or, worse, begging or going without.⁴

Several women responded with blessings and murmurs of good wishes for her husband’s recovery. Aminata spoke up, telling Kadija that Benkadi did not charge interest for loans in emergencies, and borrowers could pay the loan back at their own pace.⁵ The members of Benkadi prioritized emer­gency loans for helping members in need.⁶ Group members earned access to this safety net when each week they tight­ened their already narrow budgets and skimmed a few cents off their regular household purchases, depositing the money in the group fund.

Finally, Tabika explain her loan request. Tabika was one of the busier merchants of the group, supported by two sons in Bamako and a husband with steady income as a nurse at a community health center in a nearby village. Her youngest child, barely a year old, was wrapped in a pagne tied as a sling around her torso, resting his head drowsily on her shoulder. Tabika saved four shares in her Saving for Change group and regularly took out loans. She said her son was visiting from Bamako soon and she would like a two-month loan of 20,000 CFA ($40) to give him money to buy children’s clothes, which she would sell here and in Soma. Tabika already had an out­standing loan from a few weeks earlier for buying sweet pota­toes to sell as French fries. She said the new loan would not interfere with paying back the first loan because she would separate them to make record keeping easier. She had begun taking overlapping loans very early in the savings cycle and had always paid on time.