TAMENECH AYELE – 19 years
Tamenech Ayele and Ayele Tusa live in a small rented house with their one-year-old baby. During the day the house is hot and the baby cries a lot. They are a young couple, scraping by. Tamenech is 19 years old, and Ayele is 28. She’s a high school graduate while her husband is a daily laborer who does whatever is there to be done to put food on the table.
Life isn’t a breeze, but they get by.
Not long ago, Tamenech heard a call that married girls aged 15-19 were needed at Kabele Health Extension for certain opportunities. She and a few girls showed up and after selection 14 of them joined the Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLA) group where under the Smart Start program, Ethiopian girls like her (15-19 years) and their husbands are guided on how to plan for their families and lives by equipping them with financial knowledge.
In Ethiopia, four in every five girls will have a baby by the age of 20, before they even understand the financial implications of that. Previously, Tamenech was running a small business but after the baby, she was unable to continue with the business and became a housewife. After the workshops, Tamenech immediately took a loan of 500 ETB from the association and bought chickens. She repaid the loan with the profits from the egg sale and repaid the loan of 525 ETB within two months. She then took another loan and started an edible butter business and before long she was making 250 ETB per week. Her aggression saw their living standards improve.
She plans to expand her business and buy a weighing scale. She has also benefited greatly from the strong social interaction among her team members and the association has also become a way to meet other girls and share ideas. But the most important impact of all has been on her marriage. After he attended the Gender Equality, parenting, and business skill training Tamenech noticed a change in her husband. “Previously when our child would cry, he would call me to attend to the baby. Now he doesn’t, he simply takes care of the baby.” She says. “He also reminds me of the weekly saving and training session, on top of doing the house chores when I’m away in the market.”