Ceremony (U/W), Feb. 13, GNA - The Social Investment Fund (SIF) has started implementing a micro-credit scheme under which it has disbursed a revolving fund of 20 billion cedis through rural banks and some non-financial institutions to 12,262 clients throughout the country. Mr Kwame Obeng-Nti, the Zonal Officer of SIF in charge of the Northern, Upper East and Upper West regions, who said this at a forum at Eremon in the Lawra District of the Upper West Region, revealed that 80 per cent of the clients were women.

He, however, expressed regret that only four per cent of people in the three northern regions, where poverty is more pronounced, have benefited from these credits.

This is because the rural banks in the area are reluctant to access the fund, with the reason that the interest of 10 per cent that they would get for disbursing the loans was too small. Mr Obeng-Nti said SIF, since its establishment in 1998, had received funds totalling about 30 million dollars from the African Development Bank, OPEC Fund for International Development (OFID) and the government of Ghana.

About 76 per cent of the amount had been used to finance over 1,000 to build schools, clinics and nutrition centers, boreholes, access roads and agricultural and sanitations facilities in rural communities of the country.

These interventions benefited about 1.2 million poor people, 57 per cent of whom are women in 108 districts in the country, he added. The organization spent 8.3 billion cedis to build 17 classroom blocks, 10 rural clinics/ nutrition centers, three boreholes, two KVIP toilets, three access roads and 11 agricultural and income generating activities in the Upper West Region since March 2002.

Mr Obeng-Nti later handed over a site for the construction of a six-unit classroom block with office, store, library, staff common room and a five-seat KVIP toilet for the Eremon Primary School to a contractor to start work.

Primary classes one, two and three of the school hold their lessons under trees, prompting SIF to intervene.