By  Ebele Orakpo
Kafanchan town in Kaduna State, famous for its railway station in the 80s, is now becoming famous for hosting the Fantsuam Foundation (FF), thanks to the efforts of a couple, Prof. and Mrs. John Dada who left the comfort of city life to settle in the rural area to pursue their passion and dream – integrated rural development.

In a chat with Vanguard in Kafanchan recently, the couple spoke on how they started their microfinance programme with just N60,000 and today, have disbursed over N100m in micro credit.
Excerpts:

What made you leave the comfort of the city to settle in a rural community and how did you come about the name Fantsuam?

Prof. John Dada  I did not hear a voice from heaven saying: ‘John Dada, go and start Fantsuan Foundation, no. I trained, worked and retired as a microbiologist. I left Nigeria to seek greener pastures. I was an economic migrant. There was a Christmas I couldn’t pay electricity bill for my family as an associate professor and I felt that was enough so I left for the UK and within 2 – 3 years, I had met my financial needs and began to think of what to do next. They don’t need me over there because they have enough. It’s at home I am needed so I came home. I then thought of what I was going to do.

I ran into an article on Grameen and I thought about the Grameen micro finance. Because of that article, I sent my wife to Bangladesh to go and study what they do there and then come home and replicate it. I was paid N60,000 as gratuity after so many years of service. So I gave the money to my wife to go and start the micro finance program in her village. She said the money wouldn’t come back and I said it didn’t really matter, she should just go ahead; if the money came back, fine and if it didn’t, fine.

At least when I go to the village, people will stop coming to disturb me because each time I went home, they would come and I would dole out money, they will thank me and go. But when we started the micro finance program, these same people would bring me chicken, kunu, fruits, etc. The people were now giving to me because it was more dignifying for them to take a loan and improve their living standard. Fantsuam is the name of the tribe in our host community. The organisation was named in their honour.

Mrs. Comfort Dada: All I wanted was to be in an academic environment but I eventually discovered that what I am doing met my ambition in life. It’s not really the title but the fact that the brain is working. So far, I have been involved in two researches internationally and for me, it gave me back the academic aspect which I wished I had pursued in life.

We started in 2001. had to learn on the job because as a classroom teacher, I had no rural development background but I had these opportunities to travel out of the country to look at one or two models. The first trip I made outside the country was just to help me start the first program we had in Fantsuam Foundation, working with rural women and giving them small loans. When I went to Bangladesh and saw the way the whole thing was run, I told them ‘no, I know Nigerians could be quite fraudulent.

I don’t think this thing will work in Nigeria,’ but they told me that fraudulent people are everywhere but the most important thing you have to do is put the correct measures in place and when you have your standards, people will comply and that was exactly what we have done here.  I still doubted, but the first time I tried it, it worked.

We started with 25 women in my own community of Kpunyai, about seven kilometers from Kafanchan and they responded positively. It is very interesting that we used our personal fund. We started the loan with N60,000, it was a revolving loan and when these women paid back, we were so excited that we had to request the board members to invest in the project and they were quite willing to do so. That was when it expanded.

Last year, given our record, we have been able to disburse to over 15,000 women since we started in 2001. The highest loan we have given is N1.5 million to rural women and small business people around Kafanchan. For us, the expansion is quite motivating because it was something we started small and with time, it grew.

The motivation basically was that I had the opportunity of seeing something like that working in another part of the world. I was encouraged that it could work here. I saw it working and saw the impact. Again, if you are passionate about something, you do it from the depths of your heart, you don’t see it as a burden because it’s something you enjoy doing.

You started with micro finance project, but you have other projects like Gaiya, Fantsuam Academy, family health clinic, etc. What gave rise to these other projects?

With the micro finance project, we didn’t realise we were falling into a big need. All we thought was that she would just do micro finance in her village and I will come home, drink palm wine and rest in peace, but that didn’t happen. From the initial N60,000 in 2001, the micro finance arm of FF has disbursed over N100 million today.

We thought we could eradicate poverty with micro loans but we didn’t know that poverty was more than money because within a short time, we realised that this money was not meeting the needs.

First of all, HIV/AIDS hit us badly. Our clients were falling sick and dying. They were not able to repay the loans because they were using the loan for healthcare, funeral, drugs, etc. so we started HIV/AIDS Support Group. When we started the support group, we discovered that every week, we were either coming from a funeral or going to the funeral of a member. All that is behind us now because we confronted that issue and became a referral centre. We later realised it was not just HIV/AIDS.

People who had died of the scourge left children behind. Grandmothers were looking after grandchildren. Grandmother was getting weaker while grandchildren were getting stronger; that was a mismatch so we had to start another intervention for grandmothers. We have about 110 grandmothers in our book. They receive monthly stipends, free medical care in our clinic and every year, at Sallah or Christmas, each of them gets a new wrapper. It’s something they always look forward to.

Mrs. Dada: The micro finance project gave rise to a lot of the projects we are running now. When we came here, we introduced our field officers to the use of computers for data entry, and the community said they want to learn. That was when we started the computer skills training and for quite a while, the profit we were getting from the loans was what we were using to run the school.

Now we have about four sets of computer skills training viz: Fantsuam Academy, CISCO Academy, Microsoft IT Academy and Outreach programmes. Living in a  rural community and doing this rural development gives you an opportunity to react to people’s needs. Then when we gave these women loans, we discovered that repayment was a problem.

That was why I told you about the research aspect of the program. We discovered they were using the loan for health care. So we started the HIV support group. We got working with another NGO. They believe it takes healthy women to run businesses. So they said ‘ 95% of your borrowers are women, you need to come up with something related to reproductive health,’ so we started creating this health awareness which is how our health program actually started. Now, we have a whole health unit.

When I came here from Jos newly, if I had to check my mail, it means spending the whole day in Jos. So people were saying why don’t you have internet access here? We tried a lot of devices but we finally had to go in as an internet service provider as a result of a pressing need in the community.

We are the first internet service provider in Kafanchan and at the moment, we share our bandwidth with institutions and cyber cafe owners in town.  Most of our projects are reacting to the needs within the community.

We discovered that parents who died of HIV infection left kids and elderly ones behind so that was how we started the project for orphans and the vulnerable. These orphans need people to stay with them and that was what led to the grandmothers’ project. So the whole thing is integrated and that is why we say we are into integrated rural development. You discover that you actually want to assist the orphans but who is taking care of them and how is the person taking care of them coping?

That was what gave rise to the Grandmothers’ project. These are grandmothers who are left to care for their grandchildren who lost their parents to HIV/AIDS. We give them a monthly stipend of N300 and sometimes when we do resource mobilisation, we tell people ‘look even if it is 5 or 10 grandmothers you will be giving the stipend for the whole year, it goes a long way. We started with N200 per month and later increased it to N300 and I remember one of the grandmothers meeting Prof. and saying ‘ah, my son, you’ve increased my salary’ and he said it’s really nothing but she said it goes a long way to help because that extra N100 could make her a pot of soup. They really appreciate it.

Staff recruitment

Initially, we didn’t have the resources to employ people but with the Gaiya project which was introduced to us by Voluntary Services Overseas (VSO), we were able to teach graduates,  school leavers and retirees the concept of volunteering and then we do placements for them. We see our position for such graduates as a launching pad. We have collaboration with VSO, they recruit international volunteers from all over the world and deploy them. They come in here and spend 1 or 2 years.

Criteria for getting loan?

We walk into a community we want to work with and request the assistance of the community leader. It is the community leader that mobilises the women in his community and guarantees them. It is this group that we start working with. If it is an individual, he needs to have a savings record with us, he has to be somebody who has saved for like two or three months and we see how credit-worthy he is and also he needs to come with a guarantor in addition to having a certain percentage of savings.

Example, he has to have 40% of the amount he wants to take as loan in his savings and that serves as collateral. If it’s a group loan, we work with communities, and community/religious leaders guarantee their members.

We have the four-month loan with 13% interest rate, and the six-month loan with 20% interest rate with 30 days grace.

Your target group seems to be women, why is that?

In Bangladesh where I studied the model, their target group was women because they discovered that women are more credit-worthy and for the rural women, each time they had an additional income, they think of how to improve the standard of living of their families so that was why I started implementing that model. We have also discovered that men don’t usually pay back loans on time. We still accommodate men anyway.

What are the challenges you face working in a rural setting?

One major challenge is resource mobilisation. We also need space because the space here is not enough. Again, as a rural NGO, we would employ accountants and finance officers and they wouldn’t want to stay because the basic facilities they enjoy in urban centres are missing here, so we had to set up volunteering program (Gaiya) which means free gift of labour. Tell us about your program for the orphans

The orphans need education, nutritional care, healthcare etc. Those who are locals come to FF to get their meals and the only criterion is that they go to school. Those who are not resident here, we send them their own nutritious products with the support of USAID program for children.

To make the lives of these children even more complicated, adults who are positive and still in denial of their status look for somebody in the community – either a very old woman or a very young child who is an orphan – and say that is the person who had bewitched them and then the person’s life is at risk so sometimes we undertake rescue mission. We recently rehabilitated two children whom we took away from their families.

It was over a year before the family realised that the children were not responsible for their condition because even after they left, the problem still persisted. So our ultimate goal is to reinstate the child where he belongs. So we try to strengthen that family system to still accommodate these kids and support them.

We are currently involved in a project to ascertain the number of children under-five suffering from sickle cell anaemia. Nigeria has the highest sickle cell incidence in the world and we are doing the least. It is basically a genetic problem, a genetic adaptation to malaria. We wanted to know how many people really have the problem.