Forward

"Women in Development" has been a prime focus of Peace Corps/The Gambia since 1985 and continues to be an important and integral part of all our projects and programs. Peace Corps volunteers in The Gambia have recorded the heavy workloads of village women and recognize the importance of helping them to ease this burden by improving their quality of life.

Like most African women, Gambian women rank among the poorest in the world, and are often the main and sometimes the only providers for their families. They prepare food, fetch water, raise children, and gather fuel, while at the same time producing over 70 percent of the food grown in The Gambia. Yet despite their great productivity, women have the least access to resources such as credit, agricultural inputs, or labor saving devices.

In 1989, Peace Corps/The Gambia's newly formed WID committee accepted the challenge of preparing volunteers in each sector to assist the women they live and work with in improving their standard of living, thus becoming more acceptable as a vital key to development in The Gambia. They chose to do this by sponsoring a workshop on Money Management for volunteers and their counterparts, of which this manual is the product.

Helping the women to earn more money and manage it more efficiently was thought to be an initial and effective way to begin. Therefore, the following pages have been designed to assist volunteers in their efforts to train village women in some basic money management skills. Community development workers, men and women village leaders, NGOs, PVOs and others who work with Gambian women might also find the manual useful.

The production of this manual represents an important step in our efforts to improve the quality of life for the Gambian woman. We hope it will inspire others to develop additional materials to help achieve this goal.

Special acknowledgment goes to Sheila Reed for her skillful talent in planning, facilitating and coordinating the first successful Peace corps Women In Development workshop and manual in The Gambia.

Lacey O'Neal
Country Director
Peace Corps/The Gambia