Utete, TZ – Village Community Banking group’s sewing program raises the women and children’s lives in their community – Nov 2023

KCM in collaboration with Juhudi Vicoba Women Empowerment Group (JVWEG) continues to assist more families and children’s lives in their communities by providing sewing knowledge to generate a predictable income for their own lives.

JVWEG is a registered Vicoba group founded in 2020 by eight tailor women who united together to share sewing experiences, challenges and knowledge to develop their tailoring skills and market. Their objective is a sustainable shared savings fund for supporting each other family’s lives and economy, by providing members loans with affordable interest rate.

JVWEG introduced a tailoring training program when training its group members who were ironing customers’ clothes. This program became an opportunity for other families, members and children interested in tailoring training. This brought a positive impact to many women and children’s lives transforming their time and energy to generate their own sustainable income .

The municipality loan support for the local entrepreneurs assisted them to purchase four manual sewing machines, fabrics and other materials. They also bought an embroidery machine with funds from a savings plan. Asha and Miriam joined later with their own electrical tailoring machine supported by KCM.

Asha and Miriam are among the trained students from JVWEG Vicoba with good experience in sewing, accounting and business developments. JVWEG aims to improve its sewing training in the future by adding more sewing machines and material sufficient for business and the students’ training, and to provide loans to qualified members to start their sewing business. Currently, a student pays only 30,000 TZS / US$1.25 registration fee to start the course, which covers sewing material costs and fees for any families that fail to pay.