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Nozomi Ide's picture
Nozomi
Ide

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Member for
7 years 5 months

My Posts

Dear Atsuko,

Referring to your last question, I recently heard about an interesting study conducted by the World Bank's Gender Innovation Lab. The team introduced "psychometrics testing" to assess the ability and willingness of women to replay loans. The assessments include business skills, intelligence, ethics & honesty, and attitudes of female lenders. This may sound a bit like social investing. However, this is meant to replace collateral or credit history required by FIs. What they lack is that the study does not necessarily focus on the agriculture sector.

This reminded me of the successful factor of Grameen Bank which partially counted on social capital as collateral substitutes. The bank agents also visited loan groups often to follow up their business plans, that was particularly essential. This helps the bank to understand the situation where women face family pressures to spend the money for other purposes than original businesses.

Lastly, I would also be very much interested in knowing where there is a will to increase FI's business lines to women.

Best regards,

Nozomi

Dear Holvoet,

It would be highly apprecaited if you could send me the materials. My email address is [my first name] dot [last name] @fao.org

Thank you again!

Nozomi

Dear Holvoet,

Thank you so much for all your inputs. It was particularly interesting that the soya project in Benin documented about coaching for peer women. I was also glad that FAO's fishery activities with women were known in CI as I am part of the big project team. I took notes on the further improvement.

And thank you again for pointing out the importance of national and regional policies. I totally agree that all micro/meso/macro interventions are important and influential to each other.

Best,

Nozomi

 

 

Dear Holvoet,

Thank you so much for your feedback. I totally agree with your idea.

I recently heard a relevant presentation of the WB Gender Innovation Lab on the impact assessment results of its interventions. It found that women with male mentors were more likely to break an occupational segregation and cross over into male-dominated sectors, which are usually more profitable. (Other interesting findings were that mentoring or personal initiative supporting was more effective than business skills training in the longer term and that a loan scheme worked when banks relied on personal trust and characteristics of women who lacked collateral.)

However, those cases were not in the agriculture sector, but in the service sector. Due to market saturation, conventional strategies, such as processing or branding and group formulation, do not always add value to women's work. Do you know any cases or strategies in the agricultural sector that successfully increased women's profits?

Thank you again,

Nozomi

Dear Demba,

Thank you so much for providing valuable information. I cannot agree with you more that ICTs are significant and efficient tools and complementary to direct mentoring. I see that ICT would rather effective to accelerate or expand work of women who are already (or most likely) on the scene by sharing market information, banking, georeferencing, and many other entrepreneurial skills.

Your feedback was greatly appreciated. Have a nice day.

Nozomi

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