IFAD Gender Awards 2015

Latin America and the Caribbean
Rural Finance Programme, Belize
The programme has been working since 2009 to ensure that women have equal
access to the financial services that are being supported and strengthened. They
now account for 57 per cent of participants. A pre-financial training module
is used to introduce women to the basic concepts of financial literacy and
to motivate them to become members of credit unions. Training for young
people in how to draw up business plans specifically focuses on reaching young
women in rural areas. The trainers ensure that the language and examples used
are relevant to both women and men, and avoid stereotypes.
The programme has prepared a gender manual and trained credit union
staff to integrate gender awareness into all aspects of their work, including
a focus on sexual harassment in the workplace. The credit unions have
subsequently made their offices more gender-friendly – including children’s
play corners and waiting areas for pregnant women – and improved customer
confidentiality. Significantly, credit officers can no longer assume that women’s
assets are available to guarantee their husbands’ loans, and women’s financial
information is now treated as confidential. Most of the board and committee
members for the six unions taking part in the programme are women.
Since 2011, these credit unions have provided over 2,800 loans for a value of
US$2.7 million. Women have taken out 60 per cent of those loans.
http://operations.ifad.org/web/ifad/operations/country/project/tags/belize/1456/project_
overview
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©Belize Rural Finance Programme