By Jean West Rudnicki
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| Caption: Kristin Johnson (left) and Renae Adam (center) with the founding members of the Women’s
Batik Co-op in Prampram, Ghana. (Photo by Danielle Peck, London). Note: All photos in
this article were taken by WIP volunteers. |
The hum of hand-powered sewing machines buzzes all day
in Molly Dhan’s balcony-converted workshop located in the
city of Cape Coast, Ghana, in West Africa. Business hasn’t
always been good. Just two years earlier, Molly, an experienced
seamstress, struggled. She ran her tiny sewing business with one
apprentice from a small, two-room flat. With too few customers
in the town’s saturated market, it was nearly impossible for
Molly to support herself.
Joining Global Mamas, a network of small, women-owned
businesses assisted by the non-profit organization, Women
in Progress, brought dramatic changes to her business and
her financial situation. “Before joining Global Mamas I did
not have a bank account,” Molly replies to my written query.
“Now, I have more money and four workers. I am also training
apprentices without charging them a fee.”
Make no mistake. Molly’s achievements are the direct
result of her own hard work, but the non-profit organization
(Women in Progress), established by two college graduates who
met while serving in the Peace Corps, provided just the kind
of assistance necessary to help Molly turn her business and life
circumstances around.
Renae Adam and Kristin Johnson (both with MBAs now) first met
in 1992 while working in Ghana for the Peace Corps. Ten years later
they founded Women in Progress, and set up Global Mamas, the brand
name for the Ghanaian women’s products.
During her Peace Corps service, Johnson was assigned to work with
the credit union association. Smaller towns and villages had womenbased
credit unions, but Cape Coast, the city she lived in, did not.
She helped establish the Progressive Women Credit Union, which
continues to thrive today with more than 1,000 members.
“The women of Ghana are amazing,” Johnson says. More and more
women are working outside the home. When they get home they
still must cook a meal and coordinate the laundry. “There are no
microwave TV dinners. They must cook everything from scratch, and
do the laundry by hand,” she notes.
“Ghanaian women are known for being good financial managers,”
Johnson adds. That is one reason the credit unions have been so successful. The repayment rate is above 90 percent – because the
women take it so seriously.
 It was these hardworking women who captured the heart of the
young Peace Corps volunteer. “Seeing the things that I could do to
help make a difference was just so meaningful because these women
work so hard. It was great to do something that made their lives a little
bit easier,” reflects Johnson.
Adam, who lives in Ghana and is the Executive Director of the
organization, and Johnson, its International Trade Director in the
States, had observed countless economic development programs that
targeted women, but from their point of view and from the point of
view of the women they served, these programs had little impact.
Johnson explains that a group might want to help women business
owners better manage their finances, so they would teach a class in
accounting. When it was over, though, there was no one to provide post-training support for the women to help
implement the new ideas they had just been
taught.
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