Ingrid Munro
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Ingrid Munro founded and manages Jamii Bora, a microfinance organization based in Nairobi, Kenya.
[edit] Life
Munro is Swedish, and worked for eight years for the Swedish government in the bureau of housing research. She then began her career as an advocate for the poor in Kenya, pressing for their right to housing as a staff member of Habitat and the head of African Housing Fund, an advocacy group for the homeless.
Her father was a missionary and medical doctor. She herself is a Christian, and has mustered the support of churches in Sweden, although Jamii Bora equally serves the Christians and Muslims living in Kenya.
In 1999, upon Munro's retirement, she founded Jamii Bora along with 50 women beggars, loaning them twice as much as they agreed to save. Munro said she came to know the women after she and her husband, a Canadian, adopted first one boy who had lived on the street, then his two brothers, beginning in 1988. The New Yorker quotes her as saying, "It was a small seven-year-old boy who more or less adopted us....And then we later found his two brothers and adopted them. With a situation like that, like in all great love stories, in literature and in real life, you are a helpless victim, you know?"
[edit] Jamii Bora
Jamii Bora means "Good Families" in Kiswahili. Although its work began in Nairobi, and it has a strong presence in the slum area of Mathare Valley, the organization now operates in provinces throughout the country.
As of mid-2007, Jamii Bora had 150,000 members across Kenya, and now provides health and life insurance, business education and housing loans to its members. The average loan it makes is for $95, which is also its break-even point, as the return becomes proportionally smaller with the size of the loan, while the costs to administer it remain the same.
On March 21, 2007, Jamii Bora won a law suit against an environmental group, which was backed by a rich landowners' association, to build a new town, Kaputiei Town, for about 10,000 residents of the slums of Nairobi. The new town is under construction outside the capital.
On the Jamii Bora Web site, Munro is quoted as saying: "One cannot lift a person out of poverty. There is no country in the world that has raised itself out of poverty through charity. What we offer to Jamii Bora members is access to a ladder that they can climb up to take themselves out of poverty. But the climbing they must do themselves."
