Rekha Devi
Rekha Devi of Nepara village has been married, and has 3 daughters and 2 sons. She has been striving hard to support the family – running a poultry business and weaving of bed sheets which are supplied to hospitals. The loan that Rekha has received through CDOT has helped her in expanding her poultry business.
Now she has about 300 chicks, which she rears and sells with a monthly profit of Rs. 5000 – 7000 per month. She has also taken loan to expand her husband’s venture, and that fetches an additional income of Rs. 7000-8000 per month. She sells her woven produces through a local cooperative, which saves her from the prey of local touts.
She now has a bank account where there is a regular savings which would be spent on the marriage of her daughters. It is noteworthy to see the increased self-confidence and the respect that Rekha enjoys within the community because of her improved financial status. It is evident that financial services help to protect livelihoods by regularising income flows and reducing variability in consumption levels appears to be fairly consistent. It also provides a very practical basis for poor women to come together on a regular basis at the same time as promoting new ideas, opportunities and social relations. Female clients enjoyed the support of their family, especially because the male head in the family of the household have been able to take more benefits from their participation with the MFI.
As a development institution CDOT always take holistic approach of development. Our vision is to reach the people with multiple products as per their requirement. We started working on financial inclusion probably we are among the first few organizations in this sector. Financial inclusion is one area where 360-degree services related to financial services is delivered to clients. We started working in this field from very beginning and now serving to 5 million clients across 6 states. We faced many problems at initial stage but as technology improved now it is real big thing has been created with huge network of BC agents providing all possible kind of services to untouched rural and urban mass. Now all kind of credit is also being proposed through BC network. During COVID period also BC agents worked very bravely and acted as true warriors.
COVID-19 given us a lot of learning. We learnt and converted this into making the organization more efficient and effective. At one stage where every where lock down but we kept on working and developed many inhouse software to operate more efficiently. It helped us to learn working from home and better control and deliveries. CDOT capitalized the opportunity and improved the deliverables to communities.
With a workforce of 200 people that totally depends on revenue was a big challenge for us but we worked kept giving salaries and other things and very smoothly came out. So, lock down opened a new diaspora for us to operate. CDOT believe in delivering meaningful services, our work in skilling the youth and providing loan for sanitation and creating hyper local market has been excellent initiatives and we are delivering best and our team has always been stood behind the cause.
After 20 years of our operation we are fresh full of energy to deliver more and more in rural and urban areas. With our effective work force and also alumni of CDOT has proved that CDOT is capable of handling the things in effective manner. We have young team mixed with experienced people forms a dynamic team.
In coming days, we are working to be more technology driven organization and we are developing software to address the need of the community. We are venturing into rural market, livelihood, training, housing and MSME finance. Creating platform for this.
At last I am thankful to all associated with CDOT for making the institution for great importance. I am thankful to staff and financers who always believed in CDOT. In coming days, we will come out with many more feathers to our cap. Thanks again.
-R.R.Kalyan
