Grooming Centre’s Stories of Impact

Title: Stories of Impact: Real Women, Real Lives, Real Impact

Author: Grooming Centre

Publisher: Grooming Centre

Year: 2019

Number of pages: 129

Genre: Photobook

Reviewer: Obiageli Ezekwesili

This book is broken into five chapters; after a preface that was written with a very simple statement. Many of our members testified that the loans they received from the Centre are a lifeline used to scale their businesses, increase their income, and improve their personal lives. This preface written by the founder of the Grooming Centre, Dr. Godwin Nwabunka is a statement that summarizes what we normally call outcomes in the development agenda.

From the preface, the book moves on to the first chapter, and it opens up to the picture of the very amazing Mrs.Alice Ogbonna. She speaks of the Grooming Centre in a way that represents often more than 60% of women who are supported in micro activities, when she said, “Grooming Centres loans are good and profitable. I use my profits to finish raising some of my children. They all went to secondary school and are now running their individual businesses”.

 Mrs Ogbonna is an exemplification of what we know about women. Women have been found to spend more than 70% – 80% of their income on educating their children, providing access to health for family, and showing that the household income supports everyone’s growth.  

Women have often been found to spend more than 50% of their income on other people besides anything that matters to them in the big journey.

So to that extent, when you read the story of Mrs. Ogbonna and you read this personating story of a woman farmer whose supply of ugwu, waterleaf, nsaowu and garden eggs to traders has enabled her to build not just people who now have foundational literacy and numeracy skills, which are established in development as the necessary foundation that can predict whether an individual would make it in life, then you begin to understand how powerful the vision of the Grooming Centre is.

For every one Mrs Ogbonna, there are at least 500,000 others that seek to find this kind of support annually.

To that extent, therefore, Mrs. Ogbonna represents a very good model for what governments must learn in the kind of work that Centres like the Grooming Centre do for development. The SDGs can only be achieved when we recognize the fact that by enabling her children to have access to education, to quality education of the kind that has subject them to be ready to become entrepreneurs also.

What Mrs. Ogbonna and people like her that have been beneficiaries of the resources from the Grooming Centre show us is that development is not too mysterious to be tackled.

In the story of Mrs. Okubena about the Grooming Centre, one immediately learns about sustainability. Sustainability is an important factor in businesses run by women. Evidence shows that most businesses run by women, do not survive beyond year three. And a major part of the reasons that the businesses of women fail, is the problem that the Grooming Centre is solving.

In Mrs. Okubena’s statement of having first heard of the Grooming Centre 15 years ago, and yet afterwards heard about it and reconnected into the resources of the Grooming Centre’s and already is thriving based on an organisation that she had first learnt about 15 years ago, it tells us something also about the sustainability of the Grooming Centre itself. The Grooming Centre, by its successful business label, has refused to die like other fly-by-night organizations that we have seen in the business of access to microfinance.

Chapter Two talks about changing lives sustainably, as though it did not even see that in the previous chapter, lives were already sustainably changed. Would you say that the lives of all these women, Mrs. John, the woman who so loved selling clothes, that the opportunity to get her loan quickly made her so successful with just ₦40,000? Mrs. John can be put in this book as one who has been doing business now for 10 years and has two shops.

In this chapter two, the Grooming Centre says that its goal is to use its products and services to change the lives of members sustainably, and we have already spoken to that. However, one thing that is very important for us to know is that sustainability is a function of intelligence. That’s what you see in chapter two of this book. Starting with Mrs. Ifeoma Nwaeje, you read through the story of Mrs. Ifeoma Nwaeje who has not only become successful but became successful because of her mother, Mrs. Ogbonna in the earlier chapter, then you understand intergenerational equity.

Mrs Ogbonna said, “I will not leave it with I alone, I must make sure that my daughter and everyone connected to me would get the opportunity of success.” And you know in development, what we have found is that the moment a woman is given access to knowledge, you can be guaranteed that the community will become knowledgeable. That is powerful. It is a powerful thing because development is a function of the quick spread of knowledge. By ensuring that women like Mrs. Ogbonna, understand the power of knowledge and how to transfer it from themselves to their daughters, they have fulfilled one of the things that we have seen, which is that the more women are educated in a society, the faster the economic growth of that society will happen. The Grooming Centre, well done on being an important mover of the objective that we have in education.

Then I saw Mrs. Maria Ojor, who is a provision store and bar owner in Delta State. Mrs. Ojor said, “I was born in Ghana, and I lived there until I moved to Nigeria”. She said, “My father sold rice and beans and my mum sold provisions. They were business people. I started this provision store with ₦20,000. I started with a loan of ₦40,000. Now I have risen higher.”

One of the things we have found when we have looked at issues of financial inclusion is that for some reason, the financial acumen of women is out of this world. You know, a woman can sell cold to Newcastle. We normally use that as a saying because Newcastle is in the land of cold. So, if you can sell cold to them, then there is something about you that is out of this world. That is the story of why a woman would start a business with a loan of ₦40,000 and stand on the pages of such an impressive book of pictures – a book of stories of impact, looking like a billionaire. That is what runs through the tread of the kind of confidence that small businesses and access to finance through the Grooming Centre has achieved in the lives of hundreds of 1000s of women.

Stories of Impact: Real Women, Real Lives, Real Impact was launched at the Grooming Centre Hall, Ejigbo, Lagos on 28 April 2022. Ezekwesili reviewed the book at the ceremony.