Changemaker David Clemy has been partnering with African Road since 2014 to bring VICOBA to six communities across East Africa, generating over $10,000 in savings, launching over 90 new businesses, and impacting over 1300 lives.
In 2010, I started a great conversation with a group of seven elderly women in a rural community in Uganda. At the time, I didn’t know that this conversation would become a model that is now helping raise individuals and communities out of poverty. The conversation was all about the things that they couldn’t do, the many problems they had in the community, and a list of needs for their lives. As a young man, it was difficult to constantly hear “we need” and, of course, I had no capacity to provide the needs they asked for. We discovered that talking about their needs each time we met was not productive and moved the conversation to “we have,” and slowly, the conversation started getting exciting.
This turnaround of thinking helped changed mindsets, which in turn built community, self-esteem, creativity, and agency for these women to do something for themselves without waiting for anyone. As they marveled at their success, these women began recruiting other members from the community to join them. After seeing the results the process birthed we decided, through the Kitega Centre, to adopt it as a model for empowering communities and call it Village Community Banking or VICOBA for short.
The name VICOBA makes many people think of it as a saving and loans association, but it is not just that. Key in the model is building and deepening community, facilitating individual and group dreams, collective action, and finally, transformation. Participants define VICOBA with these words: hope, community, friendship, love, empowerment, development, hard work, mindset change, education for their children, and new house income; the list is endless. These are words and symbols of true happiness and, of course, greatly define what it means to be flourishing.
I have been privileged to journey with several different communities in East Africa, through partnership with African Road, replicating the VICOBA model within their specific community contexts. There is much joy seeing something that started in Uganda being utilized all over.