Micro-Enterprise Development: Assisting HIV & AIDS Impacted Communities in Developing Countries

The poverty impact of HIV & AIDS affected developing citizens continues a cycle of heavy burdens. The reality that these citizens already have limited access to health care and education about the disease is still impossible to fathom, even with all of the resources western states have access to. Micro-enterprise development is a long-term solution for providing microfinance loans and strengthened business activities and communities for these citizens, yet are still faced with the growing communities of HIV & AIDS impacted people. These citizens, who still need to earn a living to support their families, are confronted with minimal resources for the disease. Food and everyday necessities are a scarcity that must be dealt with first. The commencement of micro-enterprise development programs are being called upon to assist with those communities affected by low per capita income, rising costs of health care, caring for orphaned children and the rapid growth of population in major developing cities. Proposed solutions of economic and health education support have gained worldwide notoriety from the United States federal government and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), but are these solutions enough to wipe out the epidemic of both poverty and a terminal illness? The purpose of this study is to focus on micro-enterprise development groups' roles that assist those communities lacking the resources to start a business that will enable them to earn a substantial income and at the same time, are afflicted with a disease that has no cure.

Focusing on the history of micro-enterprise development, the combination of providing business solutions for citizens combating HIV & AIDS, and contrasting the risks versus the benefactors of micro-enterprise development and the assistance it provides will be carefully studied throughout this case study. Many microfinance institutions (MFIs) that specialize in this industry are creating innovating networks and solutions to help battle this underestimated population.

Recognition and Building

The worldwide media attention of AIDS in poorer countries is well known, moreso in recent years due to the large amount of people dying of this illness everyday. The death toll alone for Africans with AIDS exceeds the amount of deaths of all the wars on the continent between the years 1999-2000. Brittain (2000)

The impact of poverty creates hardships for those already living in despair and battling the disease. Rising costs of medication and the accessibility of it is very slim causing western states to finally get involved with the problem at hand. Many of these countries are faced with horrendous acts of violence, racism, civil wars and uncontrollable governments, that throughout the whole history, it is quite difficult to have viewed the AIDS epidemic as any but important. Now faced with indebtedness to many western institutions, to play catch-up with the AIDS dilemma has been deemed impossible for most developing nations.

NGOs around the globe have stepped in to provide solutions with creating micro-enterprise development for citizens at this level. The significant vision for most NGOs is to provide the necessary tools the people will need first to get out of poverty. Assistance from microcredit institutions such as the Grameen Foundation founded by Nobel Peace Prize winner, Muhammad Yunus, have provided microcredit to every continent and benefited over 100 million families for the past thirty years. Microcredit is the extension of small loans to entrepreneurs too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans. Providing credit to people living in rural Bangladesh has proven to be an effective weapon in the fight against poverty. Yunus (2003)

According to another NGO, World Vision, one of the tremendous aspects of this organization is to assist women living with the disease who still need to work. Women are particularly immune to the disease due to the intricacies they are forced to endure such as bribery, early force of sexual behavior and lack of education. Opportunity International (1999) There is an alarming imperativeness to assist the women who are left to head the households when their husbands or significant other perishes from the disease or have simply vanished, leaving behind children to be raised.

Women Hold Up Half the Sky

Women are very significant in needing the most help from MFIs. In order to outreach to this group, the women must first feel comfortable. The families living in other continents are deemed for downward spiral of poverty from the start. Where there is no work, many of the men are forced to migrate elsewhere to find employment. The wives that are left behind become vulnerable to militant groups who taken advantage of and the women are infected with the disease. Facing enough hardship with poverty, they are now inflicted with a disease and shunned upon from their community. It is shameful to walk around with a full house of dependents and there is not enough food to go around let alone be dishonored with such an afflicting disease.

MFIs who send their constituents to travel abroad constantly conjure ideas to assist the women in particular to incorporate them into groups who are going through the same thing. Because HIV & AIDS can push economically secure households into poverty and poor households into destitution, the women of these households are held responsible for keeping the family together. Representatives of MFIs host workshops and case study roundtables for those that can benefit from micro-enterprise development.

MFIs, which reach thousands of clients, have been effective in delivering basic HIV & AIDS education--which has been responsible for increasing people's willingness to be tested for HIV and breaking down stigma and discrimination. Economically stable households are better able to access and apply health information. When community-based organizations successfully run profitable micro-enterprises, they can generate funds to support community education efforts. Hargreaves (2002)

Roles of Micro-enterprise and Microfinance

Micro-enterprise development can help households in crisis recover and develop household safety nets. Micro-enterprise development offers access to assets, grants, savings, livestock, and tools, etc., as well as training and market access to help families start micro-enterprises and farms. For economically stable households that support orphans and other vulnerable people, micro-enterprise development develops income and assets, provides loans and insurance for emergencies, and strengthens micro-enterprises.

Micro-enterprise development also helps with succession planning to protect survivors' assets and transfer knowledge and market linkages. At the community level, more economically secure households are better able to contribute to and provide a community safety net. Micro-enterprise development also encourages community safety nets that build both social and financial assets through credit groups, emergency funds, producer associations, and assistance to existing support groups in pursuing income generating goals.

The care and support MFIs are giving to citizens who are living in despair in developing nations have proven to be a success thus far. Measurement tools for statistics for women living in Africa with HIV & AIDS who have benefitted from an overall introduction to micro-enterprise development as a whole has proven a track record that portrays statistics that seemed utterly impossible to those that had just started in the microfinance industry.

Statistics

The International Labor Organization (ILO) studied the actual impact of AIDS on gross domestic product between 1992 and 2002 in 50 countries that had different HIV-prevalence rates. The results showed that in the 41 countries where the economic impact of HIV and AIDS was measurable, the impact was to reduce economic growth by 14 percent over 15 years. Countries with a 20-percent infection rate experienced 2 percent lower annual growth due to AIDS. AIDS reduces economic growth by:

weakening people of working age and undermining the human capital base;

decreasing public revenues, and thus reducing the capacity of the public sector to support economic growth;

diverting public and private resources to address the epidemic; and

negatively impacting private sector growth because of reduced productivity, increased costs, reduced savings patterns, and reduced national investment.

International Labor Organization (2004)

Orphaned and Vulnerable Children

What happens to those vulnerable children if the parents are not able to cope with the illness or lacks the resources to get help? The children are orphaned, again leaving MFIs the need to collaborate in a proactive manner. The challenges for orphaned and vulnerable children are tremendous in numbers as they are faced with an increase in poverty, psychosocial distress (due to the constrains on the family), and decreased food security. The issues of orphans and vulnerable children are important, not only in African countries but also in India, Cambodia, Myanmar, Vietnam, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia. (Williamson)

Educational Promotion

Although MFIs receive substantial amounts of funding and economic resources from the federal government, private corporations, and foundations such as the Grameen Foundation, the challenges they face lie within promoting the education of HIV & AIDS. Many MFIs have to again, seek outside assistance from the public health sector who specialize in social work, medical and psychological health practitioners and facilitators who can manage the communities seeking assistance.

The risks that health practitioners and facilitators who are more than likely based in developing nations for months and years at a time are faced with not only the pandemic of HIV and trying to get the word out to the people, but often times these countries are faced with internal conflict. The governing bodies of these countries have difficulty allowing NGOs to approach proactively, even if it is to benefit the citizens facing strife. Other risks include higher default levels of the repayment of microcredit loans due to the overbearing health crises.

Cross-Sector Partnerships

When faced with a widespread global issue such as HIV & AIDS, micro-enterprise development practitioners and NGOs have to ask themselves first, what is the HIV & AIDS pandemic and how harsh is it affecting communities with below poverty income level? Are staff, partners and clients well informed of the sources of services that they are committing to? What if any are the positive mechanisms that can be used before trying to create solutions to lessen the combination of poverty and the disease?

Cross-sector partnerships have to balance both financial and social goals. Some NGOs have perforated their mission to include the overall accomplishment of the generosity to provide microcredit loans. The challenges foundations are faced with when providing the loans are citizens are not able to pay back their loans. Microfinance Best Practices (2004) Providing the education of preventing HIV & AIDS so citizens can live longer and create a substantial business, is what is needed first before lending funds to a microentrepreneur. Without the proper knowledge, many citizens will not be able to pay back the funds, thus, creating a negative impact on the community as a whole.

Case Study

Established partnerships such as The Strengthening STD/AIDS Control in Kenya Project have, with financial support from the Canadian International Development Agency, established a partnership with a small enterprise development organization called Improve Your Business-Kenya. The objective of this partnership is to improve understanding of the effectiveness of providing support for alternative economic activities to female sex workers as an HIV prevention strategy. Conclusions: This collaborative approach between a HIV/AIDS prevention project and a micro-enterprise development organization underscores the need for a multi-sectoral complementarity of efforts in the prevention and mitigation of HIV & AIDS. HIV & AIDS prevention projects to be effective should avoid the grab-bag approach of seeking to address every complex dimension of the pandemic by seeking comparative advantage partnerships. Odek (2000)

The field of practice integrating micro-enterprise development and HIV & AIDS is still emerging and will foresee the future of social enterprise, donors and developing nations as a whole. Workshops, annual conferences, roundtable discussions across the globe are working diligently to create promising practices. Promising practices such as the Kibara Mission Hospital HIV Project in Tanzania has a mission to improve the quality of life of people living in target communities by reducing the spread of HIV and mitigating its effects. Mkuki na Nyota (2005) With two phases of the project, one focusing on the integrated projects and activities to outreach to the recipients and the other to focus on the leaders of MFIs and how to reiterate the technical and financial assistance to keep programs such as the Kibara Mission ongoing and modeled in other nations. The results include the integration of Savings and Internal Lending Communities groups into the HIV program of the Kibara Project has clearly diversified and strengthened the economic activities of targeted households in the community and created new opportunities, particularly for women, to accumulate savings and assets.

Closing Remarks: Just the Beginning

In conclusion, microenterprise development has proven to be more than a start in resolving the many challenges HIV & AIDS affected people are faced with across the globe. Many NGOs are not alone in this fight against poverty and disease since philanthropists such as Bill Gates have funded many NGOs to be able to financially generate this cause that is overwhelming. Gates Foundation (2008). While the focus is normally on those that live in rural area, major cities are becoming another focus to help create microloans and microcredit to the millions of people that live there. The growing population, if educated first on the HIV & AIDS pandemic and given access to medication to help slow down the disease, can benefit from microenterprise benefits second in order to live a healthy life both financially and socially.

References

African Microenterprise AIDS Initiative: Preventing the Spread of HIV/AIDS by

Empowering Women in Africa. (1999) Opportunity International, Retrieved June 1, 2008 from http://www.microcreditsummit.org/pdfs/AMAI.pdf

Brittain, V. (2000, March 14) More Die of AIDS than war in Africa, says Kofi AnnanGuardian Unlimited. Retrieved May 28, 2008 from
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,230425,00.html

Global Development Program-Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, (2008) Financial Services for the Poor. Retrieved June 10, 2008 from http://www.gatesfoundation.org/GlobalDevelopment/

Government of Tanzania, Research & Analysis Working Group. 2005. Tanzania Poverty and Human Development Report. Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota Publishers.

Hargreaves, J., et al. (2002, May) Social Interventions for HIV/AIDS: Intervention with Microfinance for AIDS Gender Equity. Retrieved June 10, 2008 from
http://web.wits.ac.za/NR/rdonlyres/BB91DCF7-4FDB-4F88-8CF0- and Work: Global Estimates, Impact and Response (2004)

International Labor Organization. Retrieved June 2, 2008 fromhttp://data.unaids.org/Cosponsors/ILO/ILO_HIV-AIDSGlobalEstimates2004_en.pdf9720DF6FB830/0/Monograph.pdf

HIV/AIDS

Odek, W. et al. (2000) International Conference on AIDS. (2000 Jul 9-14;) 13: abstract no. WePpD1326. The MBP Reader on Microfinance and HIV/AIDS: First Steps in Speaking Out. A Resource Document Prepared for the Africa Regional Credit Summit, Harare, Zimbabwe (2000) Microfinance Best Practices. Retrieved June 10, 2008 from http://www.microfinancegateway.org/files/19224_N_067.pdf

Williamson, J. (2001, March) Finding a way forward. Principles and strategies to reduce the impacts of AIDS on children and families. Retrieved June 1, 2008 from http://www.popline.org/docs/172053Yunus, M. (2003) Banker to the Poor: Micro-lending and the Battle Against World Poverty. New York: PublicAffairs.