Jane Shakespeare's research project with the Kayoma Women's Microcredit Association

Jane Shakespeare graduated in July 2006 after completing a part-time Economics and Administration degree. She was particularly interested in Development Economics and especially Microcredit, which are schemes that allow poor people to become self sufficient under normal economic conditions. This interest inspired her to research the impact that microcredit is having on recipients' lives and she applied to the Reinvention Centre to fund first-hand research in Bo Town, Sierra Leone. The title of her project, funded by the Reinvention Centre is, 'The merits and limitations of introducing a participatory impact assessment and planning system to the Kayoma Women's Microcredit Association' Jane's Research Project. People of Bo Town are linked with people of Warwick in a friendship link via One World Link (OWL) and through OWL Jane discovered a microcredit scheme which had been established two years. She chose this scheme for her research because she felt the local members of OWL would be of advantage in helping her to organise the trip. She travelled to Bo with Maria Franchi, who originally helped set up the scheme. Jane used the data collected in Bo for her final-year dissertation, which was titled ‘Which types of capital should a Microcredit Scheme be investing in its members and can this investment be enhanced by introducing an Impact Assessment and Learning Scheme? - Evidence from the Kayoma Women’s Microcredit Association in Bo, Sierra Leone’. She achieved a first (81%) for her dissertation.