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Kafanchan Peace Traders - visibility

April's Post-Election violence in Kafanchan took the local community by surprise.

Summary

Fantsuam Foundation, led by John Dada, was at the heart of tending to the immediate humanitarian relief. During the subsequent weekly UK-Nigeria online meetings the vision of a Kafanchan Peace Market was born and by the beginning of June this has translated into action with 7 woman traders being identified by the micro finance field officers as being good candidates for being the first recipients of payments of N30,000. The money is part grant/part loan to help them restart their businesses. Each woman is responsible for at least 6 family members. The woman have been chosen to reflect both the Christian/Muslim ratio in the region.

Kafanchan Peace Market Traders - a peace and reconciliation livelihoods initiative for women
        
The Background : Why is this intervention needed at this time in this location?
 
During the recent post-election violence in April 2011 the Kafanchan market, in Kaduna State in North Central Nigeria was razed to the ground.The market was the urban centre of a largely rural area of extreme poverty. Over 800 small traders lost their livelihoods - 60% were micro-businesses owned by woman. These woman are involved in agriculture, primarily growing, buying and selling rice, maize and guinea corn.
The fire at the market destroyed the livelihoods of these women, who lost their business premises, fittings and stock. The majority of these women and their families suffered additional hardships as it was a time of widespread looting, burning, fighting and killing. Without support to rebuild their businesses they, and their dependents, will suffer severe poverty. The wider community previously served by the traders also suffer through greater difficulty in purchasing food stuffs and other essentials, so loss of the traders also affects local food security.
 
The fire not only destroyed livelihoods but has decimated the local fragile economy and damaged trust between some members of the Christian and Muslim communities. The violence which was caused by  a small number of disaffected youths took the community by surprise as it had in previous years not been affected by post election sectarian conflict.
 
The proposed action plan:
 
The proposal is to help approximately 100 traders will benefit directly, plus their dependents and the people who rely on those businesses for daily purchases. Using the already established and trusted infrastructure of Fanstuam Foundation.
Prior to the fire women clients of Fantsuam Foundation had been reliable in their loan repayments, with an average of 90% repayment rate. Since 70% of agricultural and microenterprises in rural Kafanchan are run by women, the loan and grant facilities in this initiative is specifically targeted at them.
 
John Dada has already approached some local leaders to be on the Kafanchan  Peace Market (KPM) committee, and they have accepted informally. It will be a local committee including Muslim and Christian leaders. The KPM committee will select the traders who will benefit from the scheme.


The women will be selected according to two criteria.

  1. According to their previous history of running small businesses.These histories are known to FF because it had worked with the women on building up the businesses that were destroyed in the post-election violence.
  2. According to their religion. The women will also be chosen to reflect the local Muslim/Christian population balance. This will make a major statement about peace and reconciliation, and hence contribute to future local economic stability and as well as providing individual economic benefit by re-establishing the traders in business.

Through a Combination of grants and loans each woman will be given N30,000 (US$200.00). This money will fund:

  •  N5,000, one-off Grant, not to be repaid, can be used to meet immediate relief and family expenses
  • N5,000 for purchase of fertilizer and other farm input
  • N20,000 as loan to be re-invested in micro-businesses

Help from Dadamac

Dadamac is helping in several ways

  • Raising visiblity.
  • It also helped with the initial idea through discssion of how lessons learned through pyramid fo Peace in the Kenyan post elections violence might be applied in this situataion.
  • Some financial support (Pamela sent money she had been saving up towards her next visit to Nigeria)