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 one in all Ghana’s foremost enterprise leaders and a staunch advocate for girls’s financial participation. As Girls’s World Banking’s (WWB) inaugural chairwoman, she etched her title 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, dedication, and a worldwide 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 schooling with unwavering resolve. Leveraging 10 shillings, price lower than one United States greenback, she ventured into marmalade manufacturing, dealing with ridicule however forging forward with unwavering dedication. 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 ladies at massive. After six years, she had saved sufficient cash to go to Britain to check meals know-how, preservation, diet and agriculture. She additionally realized leatherwork and lampshade-making within the hope of sharing the talents with rural ladies again house. Whilst she continued working her personal firm upon her return, she devoted an increasing number of of her time to bettering ladies’s financial scenario. For instance, she established her personal program on a farm to coach ladies in agriculture, making ready and preserving meals merchandise and making handicrafts.
She paid for this system partly along with her half of the Africa Prize, a $100,000 award she break 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 value the issues they promote and decide their earnings,” she mentioned. “ what we discovered? We discovered {that a} lady promoting rice and stew on the aspect of the road is making more cash than most ladies in workplace jobs — however they don’t seem to be taken significantly.”
Recognizing the transformative energy of financial independence, she grew to become 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 growing with ladies in Ghana had been additionally percolating elsewhere. The premise was easy: greater than schooling, well being care or household planning, ladies in poor international locations 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 primary proper wasn’t legalized till 1981 in India and 1985 in Ghana. As a rainstorm subsided exterior, one lady from Wall Avenue noticed a clearing by difficult the established order. She stood up and said, “Girls need to 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 centered solely on ladies’s financial empowerment by monetary inclusion, beginning with a dedication to assist ladies entry credit score and their monetary futures.
Alongside visionaries like that one lady from Wall Avenue, 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 Girls’s World Banking Ghana (WWBG) in 1982. As its co-founder and a driving drive, 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 brilliant African garments and liked to cook dinner conventional meals, most popular to be referred to as Auntie Ocloo, within the Ghanaian custom. She often started conferences of bankers and others with a prayer, and sometimes ended them with a track: ”We Are Great.”
Days earlier than she died, she was on the cellphone from her hospital mattress to governmental officers arguing that microloans, reasonably than grants, needs to 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 lady has the chance to thrive. By our collective efforts, might we honor her reminiscence and be certain that her legacy of empowerment and resilience endures for generations to return.
Girls’s World Banking has modified the lives of hundreds of thousands of ladies, reworking their households, companies and communities, and driving inclusive development globally by monetary inclusion.
Right now, utilizing our refined 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 packages, and gender lens investing.
Assist us attain the practically billion ladies nonetheless excluded from the formal monetary system. Donate now.