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OTHER WT PROGRAMS
Entrepreneur’s Club
In 2008, Women’s Trust received $10,000 from the UN African Mothers Association. With this funding, we launched a new loan program called the Entrepreneurs Club. This program consists of providing larger loans to clients with exceptional repayment records, demonstrated entrepreneurial drive, and sound business plans. Our vision for the Entrepreneurs Club is to
grow sustainable businesses that could maximize economies of scale, employ jobless women in the area, and tap into the greater Ghana market. Ultimately, we hoped to bridge the funding gap between microfinance and commercial lending, helping to lift the entire community out of poverty by building businesses that could access capital from larger banks. This program was initially funded by the UN African Mothers Association. Read here for more.
Women’s Resource Center
This fall we secured a piece of property in Pokuase with a 77-year lease, and with the help of a generous donor and her business partners, we have begun the design process and are ready to build a resource center. In addition to providing much needed office space for our staff, the center will be a place where a woman or girl can go that is staffed, clean, well-lit, and open evenings. It would house a library, classroom space for adult classes (including our literacy program), and a computer lab. A generator will provide reliable electricity. An endowment will sustain a reliable resource that is staffed, stocked, and managed.
This project, once again, is the product of the focus groups we hold with our clients and the observations and data we have gathered on the challenges girls face going to school. As the primary caregivers and in most cases, shouldering the sole support for their families, our loan clients repeatedly express an 
interest in learning additional skills to augment their incomes. A hairdresser with dressmaking skills could work out of her shop as both a dressmaker and stylist. A food seller with baking skills could add meat pies to her repertoire of fufu, banku, and stew. A dressmaker with batik and tie-dye skills could create her own fabrics to sell or sew. The possibilities are many. There is, however, no place that a woman can go to learn these skills. The loss of income a woman incurs apprenticing herself to a practitioner makes it a choice of feeding her family or not.
In our trips to Pokuase we have noticed a total absence of libraries. There are none. Books are very difficult to obtain, and students must purchase their own to attend class. Computer literacy, with rare exception, seems to be the realm of men, and there are no computers in the schools. We negotiate with the families of our scholarship recipients to insure that they have time to study. Evenings, with just a kerosene lantern, do not lend themselves to reading.
Stay tuned for plans and construction updates.
KamiAmi
Jackie Abrams, a talented artist from Brattleboro, Vermont, connected with WomensTrust and traveled to Ghana, in 2008 to teach crocheting skills to the women of Pokuase with the goal of making a product that would serve as a business enterprise for those local women who were 
interested in learning the craft. The project, funded through a generous loan from the Mayer Foundation, has also had an environmental benefit, as the material used for “yarn” is made from recycled black plastic bags that usually end up littering the town or filling up the local dump.
For three weeks, six to fifteen women showed up every day to learn to make baskets and handbags from this recycled material. According to Jackie “It was like being part of an old-fashioned quilting bee, with conversation being held primarily in the Ga language. One of the first words I learned was kamiami, meaning ‘not too tight, keep it loose,’ an important crocheting instruction.”
Jackie and the women in her crocheting group became known as the KamiAmi women, and their new product is KamiAmi bags.
