The Woman Who Opened the Account

Njiapanda means “climbing road”. It is the village where Mama Mbonde organised the women around her into something that outlasted any single project.

She was married to the community leader, and took responsibility for overseeing the women of the village. Having heard what the Foundation had done elsewhere, she made the approach herself: her village needed public sanitary toilets.

Chickens, training, and a shared account

What distinguished her was what she did next. She invited the women into her own home and encouraged them to breed organic chickens — food for their families, and stock to sell. She was insistent that they be properly trained, and that the knowledge stay in the village.

Then she opened a common bank account. Money the women earned from the projects they worked on together went into it, so that it could be saved rather than immediately spent, and drawn on to support their families.

Why it mattered

It is one thing to deliver a project to a community. It is another for a community to build the machinery that keeps the benefit circulating after the project ends. Mama Mbonde built the second kind.

She has adopted the role of being a mother to her community and the women within it.

The Foundation’s current economic empowerment work — women’s farming groups, market access, savings and shared enterprise — follows the shape she gave it.