One day, some visitors from America watched a joyful weekly ritual, as a group of Tanzanian women under a tree used their cell phones to transfer about a buck and a half each into a communal savings fund. A cheerful chorus of notifications erupted on the leader’s phone.
Days later in Zanzibar, the visitors felt claustrophobic in a slavery holding cell — then imagined crowding into the same space with several times as many enslaved people.
Days after that, and more than 8,000 miles away, they relived the experience with a committee in Louisville, Kentucky, on day two of a four-day Executive Council meeting.
Episcopal Relief & Development President Rob Radtke described hosting a small delegation of three council members and others to evaluate Savings with Education, a microfinance program that ER&D has replicated in country after country around the world. SwE turns impoverished people, primarily women, into entrepreneurs by pooling small amounts of their own money to provide business-building loans.
“It’s an extremely effective way of not only raising people’s incomes, and helping them set up businesses, but also building community cohesion,” Radtke said. “I mean, people have tremendous resources. And it’s a question of helping people leverage them, and having enough money in the moment to go buy that bag of seeds, to plant the vegetables that you can then sell at the market.”
The Americans enjoyed gracious hospitality from bishops and others in the Anglican Church of Tanzania, which, with 2 million members, is larger than the Episcopal Church. But the heart of the trip was exposure to the culture and the people.
The Rev. Charles Graves IV, council member from Texas, described the weekly money transfer in a rural village. “The president or the treasurer of the group raised up her phone and said, ‘Is everybody ready?’ … Then everybody else in the group are holding up their phones — all the phones going ding-ding-ding-ding-ding,” he said. When one woman had trouble making the transfer, another helped her. “It was just wonderful to witness,” Graves said.
The program is based on neighbors lending to each other, but “in this group, we’ve also begun providing larger sums of money,” Radtke said, “so they can make larger loans and do bigger things.”
The program serves to empower women in a male-dominated society. Alice Freeman, council member from North Carolina, said the group erupted in laughter when she asked a mischievous question: “How do your husbands feel about this?” After a round of giggles, Freeman said “they were very complimentary of their spouses.”
ER&D has been promoting Savings with Education in impoverished areas around the world for a decade. The repayment rate on loans is something like 99 percent, Radtke said, and a couple of years ago the agency estimated that more than a million dollars in small loans had been made.
The pilgrimage to Tanzania ended on a sobering note, with a visit to Christ Church Cathedral in Zanzibar, an island about 20 miles off the coast. The cathedral was built in the 1870s on the site of a former slave market, to commemorate the end of the slave trade in Tanzania. Unlike in West Africa, where the Anglican Church was complicit in the slave trade, slave traffickers in Tanzania were primarily Muslim.
A group of 10 or so visitors crowded into a tiny underground slave chamber, where dozens of enslaved people would be held for days in oppressive heat. Julia Ayala Harris, president of the House of Deputies and the leader of the delegation, said the severe overcrowding was a processing step to determine who could survive conditions on a ship.
“I have never, and hope to never, experienced the way I felt,” she said, welling up with emotion. “It was horrible.”
Ayala Harris closed the presentation by reflecting on the arc of history. “The slave trade symbolizes what we stole from Africa,” she said. That was followed by neocolonialism, with “decades of NGOs coming in saying, ‘you’re poor, so let me do everything for you.’”
“And then we’re able to go forward in time to where we see modern women today, with cell phones,” she said, “finally being able to have that sense of pride and that self-realization that ‘I can contribute something, I can do this on my own, I am worthy. I have agency.’”
In 2018, TLC profiled a version of the Savings with Education program in Honduras.
