The Community-Managed Micro Finance project targeting women comes at a vital time where low family incomes, decreasing purchasing power and unemployment are creating worsening conditions for low income households and communities in populated settlements around Khartoum State.

With funding being secured by MTN one of the leading mobile operators in Sudan, the project will establish credit funds in four localities across Khartoum State and provide access to micro finance for an average of 80 households during the first year of operations. The project will training inputs and foster a network of credit management committees (CMCs) that will represent the primary delivery and management mechanisms for the micro-credit services to be extended to the women.

This project represents the opening of a second chapter in the development of a program that was initiated by SUDIA in 2001 and seeks to promote micro finance as a strategy for reducing poverty, promoting entrepreneurship and self-reliance amongst rural and low-income communities across Sudan. During the first chapter of the program the focus was on developing and testing a model which may be easily transferred or installed within civil society and community-based organizations wishing to provide micro finance services to their communities. What emerged was the ‘Community-Managed Micro Finance’ model which represents a decentralized lending methodology that combines social targeting of needy clients with disciplined financial appraisal and business development services.

The support provided by MTN for this one year project will now enable us to transfer our knowledge and the model to four (4) national organizations and build their capacity in becoming qualified retailers and partners for private and public sector banks looking for greater outreach and penetration for their micro finance services. In the process we will also be closely monitoring and streamlining the transfer process with an eye to harnessing the inherent upscale and replication potential of the project.

Amongst a backdrop that promotes respect and co-existence SUDIA has always advocated processes which encourage experimentation, taking responsibility and the courage to imagine other realities on many levels, intellectual, pragmatic and intuitive.   We remain confident that such partnerships between civil society and the private sector are critical to the long term requirements of advancing peace, development and prosperity for the Sudanese population.