BKK Post / 22 October 1997  
Lao request on crewmen turned down  

By Wassana Nanuam

   The military yesterday rejected a call from Laos for 
Thailand to look after the families and children of two 
Laotian crewmen who went missing after a border incident in 
Chiang Saen on October 7.
   In the incident, six Laotian vessels allegedly carrying 
contraband were intercepted by two Thai naval vessels on 
the Mae Kok river after an exchange of fire.
   But while they were being escorted to the Mekong patrol 
station in Chiang Saen, four of the vessels broke away and 
managed to flee to Laos.
   Six Thais - five immigration police officers and a 
janitor attached to the immigration police unit - who were 
on board were arrested by the Laotian authorities.
   The two other boats were seized and their crewmen 
arrested by the Thai authorities.
   Laos claimed two crewmen had gone missing in the 
shooting and believed they were dead.
   In negotiations with Thai authorities seeking the return 
of the six Thais, the Laotian authorities refused to 
cooperate, saying they were detained because they 
encroached on Laotian territorial waters.


Loans Build Bridges for Laos' Poor  

By Linda Ehrichs

   BAN DONKEO, Laos (AP) -- Little loans are delivering big 
returns for one of the most needy groups in impoverished 
Laos -- women.
   Four years ago, Seng Bounnalath was eking out a living 
in Ban Donkeo, a village of 745 people, raising a few 
animals and selling hand-woven cloth. Her husband sent what 
he could from his salary as a policeman in the capital, 
Vientiane, for her and their five children.
   "We just had enough to eat," she says.
   Then her loom broke. But rather than worsening the 
family's plight, it proved a turning point.
   Seng took advantage of a small-scale local credit 
program run by an independent aid agency, Quaker Service 
Laos, and borrowed the equivalent of $50 to repair and 
upgrade her loom. She devoted more time to weaving and 
started selling more cloth.
   Seng, 45, reinvested the profits and began setting up 
what has become a string of small-scale businesses at her 
home -- brewing rice whiskey, increasing her number of 
chicken and pigs, setting up a rice-threshing service.
   She got enough money together to buy a television and 
videotape player and set up eight wooden benches on the 
cool ground floor to show Chinese movies. Entrance to her 
cinema: 100 kip, the equivalent of 10 cents.
   Igniting such entrepreneurial spirit is the aim of 
"micro-credit" -- deposit-and-loan services in amounts of 
up to $100 that can make a difference in parts of the world 
where a business doesn't have to be big to improve lives.
   Such programs run by small agencies have been around a 
while and are increasingly viewed as a success in the world 
of development aid, where mammoth projects like dams often 
produce little but frustration and cost overruns.
   The United Nations Development Program is trying to make 
micro-credit available on a wider scale in Laos, launching 
a $7 million program to set up loan funds in 800 Laotian 
villages over the next five years.
   They won't be banks of a traditional sort -- no tellers, 
no checkbooks. Instead, the U.N. agency will help train 
small boards of village leaders in the rudiments of running 
a credit program, such as taking deposits and assessing 
loan risks. The key to success is taking the particulars of 
the local community into account.
   Typically, those seeking loans do not need collateral -- 
just a good reputation among people who know them. In 
successful loan programs, recipients often are clumped 
together, say in groups of five, and provide assurances for 
each other.
   Recovery rates in Laos and elsewhere where such systems 
have been tried are near 100 percent, although some 
operations have gotten into trouble by charging interest 
too low to keep up with the rate of inflation.
   If the programs foster enough business, they improve the 
lives of villages and the people who live in them, 
especially women, who usually run household finances. Most 
of those receiving micro-credit from current operations in 
Laos are women.
   In Laos, as elsewhere, women are generally poorer and 
less educated and have few opportunities. Because work like 
child care is non-paid, women are often overlooked by the 
few formal banking institutions that do exist.
   "Micro-credit for women represents freedom from the 
bondage of collateral," says Shoaib Sultan, a micro-credit 
adviser in Pakistan, another country where the loan 
programs have been tried.
   As a communist one-party state isolated by rugged 
terrain and no access to the sea, Laos was largely cut off 
from the rest of the world after the Vietnam War ended in 
1975.
   The country began market-oriented economic reforms in 
1986 and hopes to climb out of its status as one of the 
world's 10 poorest countries. To do that, per capita income 
-- currently around $350 a year -- needs to rise 
substantially.
   Seng is doing substantially better, earning about $800 a 
year. She is her family's primary bread-winner now. Her 
household boasts savings of $2,000, a fortune compared to 
the average $75 most Laotians hold in the form of silver 
coins or livestock.
   Nild van den Brink, a community development worker in 
Laos, says her previous experience of setting up a micro-
credit program in Nepal lifted women there to a new level.
   "These women were really the lowest of the low castes in 
the class system," van den Brink said. "Then their status 
became higher because they had access to money. It made 
them proud, independent."