PNG Women’s Micro-bank has successfully grown its customer base to 15,000.
This in itself is a great achievement, according to founder Janet Sape, noting the customers are mostly grassroot women.
“These women are unbanked. They have their money with them in their bags and they cannot access banking services because they don’t know how to,” she said.
Janet is also the founder of the Women in Business, a body that has been actively driving financial literacy among the women population.
“We try to meet and network with the women and try to help, empower them grow,” she said.
Sape was the overall winner of the Westpac Outstanding Women’s award last year. An award that has motivated her to do more and even made her work easier.
“So the grassroots women, which is really the 70 – 80 percent of women in PNG, need our support. It is my appeal to every women in PNG to help the less fortunate, the under-privileged, those who do not have access to the services that we have.
“We all need to do something to lend a hand to someone who has been left out in the society,” she said.
Westpac PNG chairman, Greg Pawson, says Sape’s work compliments the work that Westpac is doing, in terms of financial literacy.
He says out of the 70 percent of the total population of PNG who are unbanked, 50 percent of their financial literacy programs are focused on women.