Esther Afua Ocloo, a younger lady who remodeled a mere sixpence into 12 jars of marmalade, marking the genesis of her entrepreneurial journey, finally emerged as considered one of Ghana’s foremost enterprise leaders and a staunch advocate for girls’s financial participation. As Girls’s World Banking’s inaugural chairwoman, she etched her title in historical past. On April 18th, marking what would have been her one hundred and fifth birthday, we pay homage to her pioneering spirit in microfinance, embodying resilience, willpower, and a world impression.
Born into modest beginnings in Peki-Dzake, Ghana, in 1919, Esther’s narrative unfolded amidst trials and triumphs. Despatched off to Accra by her tearful mom with scant assets, she pursued training with unwavering resolve. Leveraging 10 shillings, price lower than one United States greenback, she ventured into marmalade manufacturing, going through ridicule however forging forward with unwavering willpower. Reinvesting income, she scaled her enterprise, securing contracts and establishing Nkulenu Industries, diversifying into varied meals merchandise.
However Esther’s imaginative and prescient prolonged past private success; it encompassed the empowerment of girls at massive. After six years, she had saved sufficient cash to go to Britain to review meals expertise, preservation, diet and agriculture. She additionally discovered leatherwork and lampshade-making within the hope of sharing the talents with rural ladies again dwelling. Whilst she continued operating her personal firm upon her return, she devoted increasingly more of her time to enhancing ladies’s financial state of affairs. For instance, she established her personal program on a farm to coach ladies in agriculture, getting ready and preserving meals merchandise and making handicrafts.
She paid for this system partly together with her half of the Africa Prize, a $100,000 award she cut up with Olusegun Obasanjo, the present president of Nigeria, in 1990. It was introduced by the Starvation Venture for his or her management in working to finish starvation in Africa.
”I’ve taught them to value the issues they promote and decide their income,” she mentioned. “You already know what we discovered? We discovered {that a} lady promoting rice and stew on the facet of the road is making more cash than most girls in workplace jobs — however they don’t seem to be taken severely.”
Recognizing the transformative energy of financial independence, she turned an advocate for girls’s financial empowerment. In 1975 on the UN’s First Girls’s Convention in Mexico Metropolis, Ms. Ocloo discovered that concepts she had been creating with ladies in Ghana have been additionally percolating elsewhere. The premise was easy: greater than training, well being care or household planning, ladies in poor nations want entry to capital.
Just one yr earlier than the Convention, ladies within the US couldn’t have their very own checking or financial savings accounts with out their husbands’ signatures. That fundamental proper wasn’t legalized till 1981 in India and 1985 in Ghana. As a rainstorm subsided exterior, one lady from Wall Road noticed a clearing by difficult the established order. She stood up and acknowledged, “Girls must personal their very own banking accounts.” Esther was already in violent settlement. Concepts poured from her friends after that. This easy but profound assertion planted the seed for one thing extraordinary – the primary nonprofit targeted solely on ladies’s financial empowerment by way of monetary inclusion, beginning with a dedication to assist ladies entry credit score and their monetary futures.
Alongside visionaries like that one lady from Wall Road, Michaela Walsh, and Ela Bhatt, Indian cooperative organizer (SEWA) and Gandhian, she laid the groundwork for WWB—a corporation devoted to creating finance work for girls.
Again in Ghana, Esther’s affect reverberated by way of the institution of Girls’s World Banking Ghana (WWBG) in 1982. As its co-founder and a driving pressure, she spearheaded initiatives to combine philanthropy and enterprise, demonstrating the transformative potential of sustainable establishments in uplifting ladies’s lives.
Esther, who all the time wore vibrant African garments and liked to cook dinner conventional meals, most popular to be often called Auntie Ocloo, within the Ghanaian custom. She normally started conferences of bankers and others with a prayer, and infrequently ended them with a music: ”We Are Great.”
Days earlier than she died, she was on the cellphone from her hospital mattress to governmental officers arguing that microloans, slightly than grants, ought to be laid out in Ghana’s new finances.
As we have fun Auntie Ocloo’s life and legacy, allow us to reaffirm our dedication to carrying ahead her imaginative and prescient of a world the place each lady has the chance to thrive. Via our collective efforts, might we honor her reminiscence and be sure that her legacy of empowerment and resilience endures for generations to come back.
Girls’s World Banking has modified the lives of thousands and thousands of girls, remodeling their households, companies and communities, and driving inclusive development globally by way of monetary inclusion.
Immediately, utilizing our refined market and shopper analysis, we flip insights into actual motion to design and advocate for coverage engagement, digital monetary options (see Blanca’s story right here), office management packages, and gender lens investing.
Assist us attain the almost billion ladies nonetheless excluded from the formal monetary system. Donate now.
