DEC MICRO FINANCE INSTITUTION (DEC MFIS)
DEC Enugu has provided opportunity for women in the south East Nigeria to earn a living and improve their lives since 1994. Development Education Centre Enugu was established with the cardinal aim of helping women to help themselves so as to improve their lives and that of their family. DEC Microfinance institution (MFIs) operates in villages where there is serious lack of financial services and majority of the rural people especially women not able to access financial help as a result of the cultural and traditional barriers that deprive women the opportunity to own landed property that could be used as collateral where financial services is scarcely available.
Credit for the active poor women is the voice of micro finance institution, the sustained and improved quality of life for children depends on a stabilized and improved family income, and DEC micro credit scheme promotes awareness to eliminate poverty and hunger in remote rural communities of the South East Nigeria through her economic empowerment programme.
DEC in her effort to encourage and maintain self-reliance among the community women, made micro credit facilities accessible to the active poor women to improve their standard of living through the provision of trade business loan, agricultural loan, seasonal loan etc to the women in the remote rural communities.
Economic empowerment programmes and associations have been in existence centuries ago. However, the question is why are women still economically deficient and not reckoned with in the annals of those that have made it in life outside their male counterpart? Again why the rural women are the worst hit in the scheme of economic advancement? The answer is partly as a result of the disparity in allocation of economic opportunities and also in the system and process through which these economic advancement schemes are implemented.
Having studied the above problems DEC came up with the grass root village system of banking that enabled the rural but active poor women to have access to financial assistances at the same time for their businesses unlike the traditional system of issue that only offer one the opportunity of accessing very little financial assistance from her members which might be once in a year. This system brought about the self-help groups that provide collateral security for the members and even those members that are weak in quota. DEC Micro Credit scheme Enugu have being in operations for more than twenty three years now (23) and have reached out to over 200,000 rural women clients in 500 different communities. In 2014 and 2015 operational year, DEC Enugu reached out to 9000 rural women clients from 83 communities with N100,000.00 loan credit assistance.
The loan assistance to the rural women by DEC Enugu was to help the women business enterprise for sustainable growth and self-reliance.
DEC micro finance, made micro credit facilities available to the active poor women and ensure obligation is placed on those clients to utilize the loan well so as to repay as and at when due. They accessed loans of N50,000 and above each for their small business enterprises, because they are rural based, the kind of business they do is quite limited and hence do not access big amount of loans. They all engaged in subsistence Agriculture, poultry, production of maize, palm oil, rice etc, they also engaged in commerce and trading. Their experiences have been enormous and the impact of DEC Micro Credit has been great in their lives and that of their families.