VILLAGE BANKS

00:08:00 Mulanje Mag 0 Comments

Village bank is a group formed by villagers who are organized to bank [store] their money. This was introduced three years ago in Malawi to help people in remote areas, to reduce long distances to the local bank offices.

To be part of the group, you need to register to the village head man and police station, so that they can be involved in terms of security. The Village Bank also announces to the whole village to attract those who would like to join.

These groups are given names depending on the name of the Village, for instance if the name of the village is Samson then the group might be named Samson village bank.

  

The group has got some books which are used to record all the documents concerning about money. In additional to that, small stamp are also available which are used to stamp in the books of members depending on what they have paid. The stamps have a certain value which represent a certain amount of money for example k100.00 or k500.00. This stamp is very important because nobody can manage to change or add the value of money in this book.

When banking a certain amount of money is supposed to be paid, for example k50.00 or k100.00 that will be used to pay those who have helped us for security and buying some books, no one is allowed to bank before making this payment.

Since the Banks have some money in them, the people are allowed to get loans, this helps the Bank to earn some interest. Well, these village banks face a numbers of problems mostly, people fail to pay back the loans in a good time and others completely fail to pay back the whole loan, when I asked why people fail to do so, the reason behind was that, other fail to make real commitments to the business they start and others make many business mistakes but now some of these mistakes will be reduced as some time we hold meeting to discuss how we to should use and manage to loans that we get.

From the peoples point of view ,village banks have manage to help the elders, disabilities and some people in their remote areas, many start business such as selling fish, clothes and some groceries. 

                                                                                                 Written by Ephraim M’mora