Esther Afua Ocloo, a younger girl who reworked a mere sixpence into 12 jars of marmalade, marking the genesis of her entrepreneurial journey, finally emerged as one in all Ghana’s foremost enterprise leaders and a staunch advocate for girls’s financial participation. As Ladies’s World Banking’s (WWB) inaugural chairwoman, she etched her identify in historical past. On April 18th, marking what would have been her a hundred and fifth birthday, we pay homage to her pioneering spirit in microfinance, embodying resilience, willpower, and a worldwide influence.
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 schooling with unwavering resolve. Leveraging 10 shillings, value lower than one United States greenback, she ventured into marmalade manufacturing, dealing with ridicule however forging forward with unwavering willpower. Reinvesting earnings, she scaled her enterprise, securing contracts and establishing Nkulenu Industries, diversifying into numerous 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 know-how, preservation, diet and agriculture. She additionally discovered leatherwork and lampshade-making within the hope of sharing the abilities with rural girls again dwelling. Whilst she continued operating her personal firm upon her return, she devoted increasingly of her time to enhancing girls’s financial state of affairs. For instance, she established her personal program on a farm to coach girls in agriculture, making ready and preserving meals merchandise and making handicrafts.
She paid for this system partially along 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 Mission for his or her management in working to finish starvation in Africa.
”I’ve taught them to price the issues they promote and decide their earnings,” she mentioned. “You realize what we discovered? We discovered {that a} girl promoting rice and stew on the aspect of the road is making extra money than most girls in workplace jobs — however they aren’t taken significantly.”
Recognizing the transformative energy of financial independence, she turned an advocate for girls’s financial empowerment. In 1975 on the UN’s First Ladies’s Convention in Mexico Metropolis, Ms. Ocloo discovered that concepts she had been creating with girls in Ghana have been additionally percolating elsewhere. The premise was easy: greater than schooling, well being care or household planning, girls in poor nations want entry to capital.
Just one yr earlier than the Convention, girls within the US couldn’t have their very own checking or financial savings accounts with out their husbands’ signatures. That primary proper wasn’t legalized till 1981 in India and 1985 in Ghana. As a rainstorm subsided outdoors, one girl from Wall Road noticed a clearing by difficult the established order. She stood up and acknowledged, “Ladies must personal their very own banking accounts.” Esther was already in violent settlement. Concepts poured from her friends after that. This straightforward but profound assertion planted the seed for one thing extraordinary – the primary nonprofit targeted solely on girls’s financial empowerment by monetary inclusion, beginning with a dedication to assist girls entry credit score and their monetary futures.
Alongside visionaries like that one girl from Wall Road, Michaela Walsh, and Ela Bhatt, Indian cooperative organizer (SEWA) and Gandhian, she laid the groundwork for WWB—a company devoted to creating finance work for girls.
Again in Ghana, Esther’s affect reverberated by the institution of Ladies’s World Banking Ghana (WWBG) in 1982. As its co-founder and a driving power, she spearheaded initiatives to combine philanthropy and enterprise, demonstrating the transformative potential of sustainable establishments in uplifting girls’s lives.
Esther, who at all times wore vivid African garments and cherished to prepare dinner conventional meals, most well-liked to be referred to as Auntie Ocloo, within the Ghanaian custom. She normally started conferences of bankers and others with a prayer, and infrequently ended them with a tune: ”We Are Great.”
Days earlier than she died, she was on the telephone from her hospital mattress to governmental officers arguing that microloans, reasonably than grants, must be laid out in Ghana’s new finances.
As we have a good time 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 girl has the chance to thrive. By our collective efforts, might we honor her reminiscence and be sure that her legacy of empowerment and resilience endures for generations to come back.
Ladies’s World Banking has modified the lives of tens of millions of girls, reworking their households, companies and communities, and driving inclusive progress globally by monetary inclusion.
At this time, utilizing our subtle market and client 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 applications, and gender lens investing.
Assist us attain the almost billion girls nonetheless excluded from the formal monetary system. Donate now.
