By Ebele Orakpo

Dr Evelyn Omawumi Urhobo is the Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer of Morgan Smart Development Foundation (MSDF), an NGO dedicated to the economic empowerment of rural and urban poor women and youths.

In this chat with Financial Vanguard, Dr Urhobo said that through MSDF, she has been able to help women access credit to improve on their livelihood pattern and also be in a position to take care of their families. Excerpts:

After her O’Level and A’Level certificates at Hussey College, Warri, Delta State, Dr Evelyn Urhobo proceeded to the University of Lagos and upon graduation, joined the civil service.

“Along the line, I worked with an international agency. We brought refugees from South Africa to Nigeria. For some years, I was a student counselor. Eventually, South Africa gained independence and they had to go. I then came into the mainstream civil service,” she said.

Because of her love for education and thirst for knowledge, Dr Urhobo who believes that education keeps the mind broadened, agile, and makes one have access to information, has over the years participated in a lot of programmes to update her information.

From Lagos Business School to Duke University, North Carolina, US and recently, at Harvard for a short course in Negotiation. She is doing a master’s programme in Corporate Governance at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK. “So in terms of education, I have really ensured that I am abreast with developments to make me more knowledgeable in the areas that I want to get involved so that I can come from a position of strength in whatever I am doing.”

Okere Community Bank:

“I have always been social work-oriented, always wanted to add value to society so when the Babangida administration started approving that we could set up community banks, naturally, the women group that I belonged to, The Itsekiri Duchess, decided to set up a community bank in Warri because we hoped we could use it to empower the women which was our concern at that time.

Whatever you do, you must always have an arrowhead if you want to succeed so inevitably, it was like I had to do all the pushing to ensure that the project succeeded. This year, the bank will be 20 years old. We never really looked in terms of profit, it was more in terms of using the bank to provide service and help the women access credit so that they can at least improve on their livelihood pattern and  be in a position to take care of their families.

Today, we have over 18,000 customers in that bank who we are effectively empowering in terms of making them have access to credit to help them improve their livelihoods,” she stated.

New Project:

“Recently, I started a project called Tracking Women out of Poverty where we look at specific number of women that we have empowered over a period of time to see the impact. It is a project we are working on now and we want to report on it over a five-year period to see where they started and where they are now, to be able to confirm that whatever we are doing in that bank has really made impact,” she stated.

From Community to Microfinance Bank:

“Four years ago, the Federal Government said we should translate into microfinance bank by increasing our share capital and I remember saying that ‘please I did not want to run a business, I wanted a charity organisation with a community bank so this stress level is too much.’

But we were able to meet the requirement and we have actually metamorphosed into the Coastline Microfinance Bank from Okere Community Bank. At some point, they even withdrew our licence because they said our debt portfolio was too high but like I said, the whole essence of the bank was to empower women so we were really very micro loan-driven in terms of making a lot of people but unfortunately, it led to our having very high loan portfolio and the CBN actually de-licensed us and we had to go back to the drawing board.

But we are doing very well. We have not lost our focus of empowering women because they are the engine room for development in this country and we must come to terms with that and see how we can improve their livelihood.

They are the mothers of our children, some are even bread winners in their families and unless we get them empowered, the bedrock of the nation will not be well formed. We are going to have problems when mothers can no longer meet their responsibilities towards their children. That is why our concentration is actually on empowering women which we have done over the period.”

Paying back loans:

“Interestingly, the poor ones pay back because they say they don’t want trouble. We really got burnt when we tried to do commercial banking by giving out bigger loans to business people who come desperate. When you give them loans, they don’t pay so a lot of our problems actually came from those people that we shouldn’t really have had business giving loans to.

But those within the N50,000 – N500,000 loan bracket do not default to a very great extent. We have this esusu thing where we make them register for the esusu so that they must have daily contribution and at the end of the month, they use part of it to pay off the loan they took and plough back the rest into their business.

And because we have given them money to build up their businesses, at least the business will get more efficient and they have more money to trade with and have income. So, we really do not have problem with these people and that is why our business model now is geared towards actual micro credit banking where we are going to just be dealing with the small beneficiaries.

We monitor these businesses because like I said, it is a daily esusu thing, we have esusu people who are on the field everyday to collect their daily contributions so inevitably, they get visited at their place of business. We know immediately when they run into problem. So you have to monitor to see that she gets back and continue. In very few cases, we had to put in more money when they have really fallen back to get them going again.

Contribution to the economy:

“It is the informal sector that is carrying this economy. The formal sector has collapsed. The informal sector contributes over 60 per cent because they are the people who are actually setting the engine moving and that is why when the whole microfinance policy came on board, everybody was excited because it was like we got the right focus.

Unfortunately, a lot of things happened in that sector. If you go by the policy itself, the federal, state and local governments were to channel funds through the microfinance banks so that the informal sector can have access to funds. We are in a dilemma now.

We have been able to mobilise customers and our savings portfolio is very high because we have created the awareness and we don’t have money anymore to give out to customers. As we speak, we have documented request of about N56 – N60 million but we don’t have that kind of money.

So we will go back to the CBN and try to access some funds. We are also looking at the likelihood of getting some cheap funds from other organisations that are really committed to driving growth in the sector,” she stated.