Women (em)powered

PASSING THROUGH/ Maud Elisabeth Olofsson

When the Swedish ship Guttenberg came visiting, in Chennai, it brought with it a message modern and yet as old as the two-century-old ship the visiting vessel was modelled after "" the idea of giving small finance to encourage small entrepreneurs. In this case, the entrepreneurs were Swedish women in business.

The messenger from Sweden was vice prime minister and industry minister, Maud Elisabeth Olofsson, leader of the Centre Party of Sweden since 2001, who stopped over briefly in Delhi.

Olofsson, who started her political career as an ombudsman of the youth organisation of the Centre Party in 1974, has her roots deep in organising communities (women in particular) in her own village, sparsely populated and inaccessible, in the icy North.

Recalling her early days of struggle with the rural women, Olofsson says that bringing women, or for that matter any community, together can lead to solutions. "Though we have a mere 9 million population (of which 5 lakh is rural population), people face great difficulties due to climate conditions and isolated terrain," she says.

She talks of the times when there were no banks in the country and farmers started their own banking system. The system grew and was gradually replaced by micro finance.

"We started micro credit for women in our village and now the whole country has a micro finance programme for women in place," says Olofsson.

The programme is supported by a mentorship programme that nurtures women into leaders and counsels them regarding enterprise. The advisors help the women develop business plans and evolve as leaders. This programme is supported by the government, which has put in money through an agency called ALMI.

The mentors, mainly women, are sourced from local resource centres that are placed all over the country. These mentors promote women with ideas, train them and give them micro loans. The loans are granted for different courses like computers and marketing, she says.

Taking the scheme further, Olofsson says their government is now planning to open up the public sector to make it a partnership with these women in business. But the secret, she insists, lies in the community taking the initiative.