Actors in the social and solidarity economy and the microfinance sector have not been spared by the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic. Faced with this situation, more than 600 million CFA francs have been distributed to date, through isolated microfinance institutions and grants. Zahra Iyane Thiam, Minister of Microfinance and Social and Solidarity Economy, takes stock of the situation.

Explain to us the policy of the Ministry of Microfinance and social and solidarity economy that you lead.
Within the framework of Microfinance and the social and solidarity economy, President Macky Sall's ambition is to have a strong, developed microfinance sector backed by an entrepreneurial model of the social and solidarity economy that will eventually be able to, on the basis of sustainable mechanisms, enable us to achieve social economic or financial inclusion. It's really about economic inclusion with social implications. That is why when we came, we set out to first have the strategic plan through the Microfinance Social and Solidarity Economy Sectoral Policy Letter. Because the microfinance sector, whatever we can say, is a fairly rooted sector in Senegal. It is a sector that does not date from today and it has made results. It is a dynamic sector with more than 303 decentralized financial service points, so microfinance institutions that polarize more than 900 service points. It is also a beneficial capital of more than 3,500 members. It is a sector that is well structured and dynamic. The other sub-sector, which is the solidarity economy, even though we have traditions of solidarity life, traditions of community life, it was not as elaborate or conceptualized as in other countries. In France, in Canada, these are dynamic sectors, in Morocco where the activity of the social and solidarity economy really contributes a lot to wealth creation. But here in Senegal, it was not well structured, it was not well developed and the President of the Republic, in his vision of social inclusion, made it a second national initiative that he backed with microfinance to give the entrepreneurial model all the means of its development.

What is the objective of the microfinance and social and solidarity economy sector support programme?
The microfinance and social and solidarity economy sector support programme is a one-off programme. Since December, we have been living the Covid-19 pandemic, with its health, social and especially economic effects. And the sector that I lead, especially the informal sector, where you have informal actors, cooperatives, mutuals, family farms, Gie, which are in solidarity finance, etc. The particularity of all these layers is that they are actors who put together their potentialities to be resilient in the face of economic situations. This means that these are people who must be accompanied, supervised, strengthened, because it is a significant part of the working population that is concentrated there. And so with the economic effects that we all know of Covid-19, it was necessary, as part of the Economic and Social Resilience Program, to create their conditions of resilience. This is what the President of the Republic has understood by making available to the Ministry, 800 million francs divided between the Covid-19 Force for an amount of 500 million and 300 million from the Support Fund for the Social and Solidarity Economy. It is in this context that we have initiated a national tour to go to the actors at the base at the level of all the localities on the basis of a well-controlled file to support the maximum of actors of the social and solidarity economy in the context of the revival of their activities, it concerns actors in the maintenance of the financing activity and this is through mutuals and particularly isolated mutuals that are strongly impacted by the pandemic.

What is the purpose of the tour you are conducting in the interior of the country?
The objective of the tour is to distribute the support of the State, to frame the resilience of the actors of the social and solidarity economy and the microfinance sector in the face of the pandemic. 800 million are being injected and we have done it in two phases. There is a section dedicated to the microfinance sector through isolated mutuals. Microfinance institutions, what allows them to maintain their activity is above all savings. The savings of beneficiaries who come to deposit their resources. These resources are reused to generate credit. This savings have been greatly reduced as a result of the pandemic. First, there was no more savings to deposit but especially people went to withdraw the little they had at the level of mutuals. This has deteriorated the credit portfolio. Therefore, it was necessary to try to maintain the financing activity and therefore the production of credit. But, we targeted isolated mutuals that were more vulnerable. By isolated mutuals we mean local populations who meet around a local initiative to have their local microfinance institution and do the credit activity between members. We counted several across Senegal. We have provided funding to enable them to continue the credit creation activity. The actors of the social and solidarity economy have benefited from subsidies to enable them to meet operating, production or marketing costs.

Do you have any idea of the impact of this programme on the beneficiaries you have just mentioned?
If we start from isolated mutuals, you have for each mutual selected, the number of members and these mutuals have no less than 4000 or 5000 members minimum. There are some that have 7000 members. We have some that intervene in several regions, sometimes they polarize three or four regions, we have about ten at least a dozen mutuals accompanied. That's the impact we can have from the number. The same goes for the actors of the social and solidarity economy. For these actors, we start on the basis of the grouping because the first principle of the actor of the solidarity economy is to be in a group, which is why we say it is solidarity and it is social. So we need groupings of between ten, twenty and thirty people. Sometimes, we have federations of 3000 members, for example in Tamba with the mutual Aprovac of the federation of producers of small banana producers. They are 728 producer members. It is groups like this that make the impact far exceed the 40 thousand people impacted by the program and it is an ongoing program. At the end of the tour, we will make an exhaustive statement of the effect of this program. But, we will already be able to say that injecting so many resources into the sector will certainly have a positive impact on the players in the sector. The share is significant in relation to the labour force.

What are the conditions to benefit from these grants and funding?
Strictly speaking, there are no conditions, because each actor should validly benefit from this subsidy. On the other hand, I insist on the word actor. You cannot stay at home, have no activity and claim to benefit from the sectoral support programme. You have to be in business. And for that, we have a file developed since last year on the basis of the Economic and Social Fair of actors of the social and solidarity economy that the ministry had organized. An international exhibition that had seen the participation of several countries, but also that had seen regional participation. All 14 regions of Senegal were represented at this fair through the consular chambers, whether chambers of trades or commerce and these actors who had been chosen at the regional level were chosen on the basis of criteria defined by the ministry, because we really had to have quality actors, who could represent their country with dignity and so that's a file that we had. We had, also during the 14 tours, 14 CRDs that I had organized at the national level in connection with the Territorial Administration which had taken care to identify and invite actors to these Crd-there, put together all these two files in addition to the file of the ministry that we have and so it is on the basis of of this unified file that we have segmented and we have made equitable choices according to the regions, the departments, according to the diversity and the very orientation of the program which was to combine isolated mutual funding and subsidy to the actors. On that basis, we made the choices. Now we are going to have a platform that will collect other structures and other actors that we can also add to the database and that we can frame and align with the entrepreneurial model and the social and solidarity economy that we are in charge of promoting.

What is the mid-point of the balance you draw from your national tour: the itinerary, the number of structures financed ?
We can make a partial assessment since we are in the tenth  stage of our tour. We started with the region of Thiès then Dakar to go to Matam, Kaffrine, Kaolack and Fatick, we did the southern region with Kolda, Sédhiou and Ziguinchor and we did the region of Tamba. So these are the ten steps that we have done and for these stages, there have been isolated mutuals that have been accompanied and subsidies to the actors. We are in the process of paying vouchers with the La Poste group. According to the information we have, payments are in progress in several regions. Already in Dakar, Thiès, Matam, Tamba, Fatick, Kaolack, it's going very well. There are some small technical failures that can be noted here and there but it is normal, because these are data that must be implemented, it must be traceable, we must have all the rigor and all the security necessary for the process to take place very quickly. ès bien and there really the payment goes very well. Very soon, I will be at a press conference to make an exhaustive assessment of the tour, but as of today, what we can say is that we have almost more than 600 million injected through isolated microfinance institutions and subsidies to social and solidarity economy actors. and at the moment, we have ten regions impacted by the program. On the 30th of next month, we will be in the regions of Kédougou, Diourbel, Saint-Louis and Louga to complete the tour.