Bank Accounts

Today was amazing, I was able to get 5 bank accounts opened at Barclay's for 5 of the women that work in our Krobo Assembly Center. I am hoping to get 2 more opened by the end of the month and then 3 more opened in the next month or two.

You may wonder why I consider this such an accomplishment. The reason is the documents required to open an account. The major banks in Ghana (Ghana Commercial and Barclays) require either a passport, or drivers license if you don't have either one then you have to produce 2 forms of identification (birth certificate, national id card, baptism certificate, national health insurance card, etc). They also require that the person who opens up the account has a mailing address and a residential address and know when and where they were born. This is where all the problem started. None of the women that I work with have birth certificates, 2 of them did not know the exact date of their birth, and the list goes on and on.

Getting the accounts opened was a real lesson on life in Ghana. I thought that I knew how to ask questions of the women so that I could get the answers that I needed until we had to fill out the form for the account. I would ask when were you born and they would tell me the town, I would ask when their date of birth was and they would give me the year. It reminded me of what our great-grandparents would have answered when asked.

None of them had a postal address so they all had to go and find some place to use as a postal address. In Ghana there is no home mail delivery, all mail goes to a PO Box, so most of the women used the church that they attend or a local community center.

When I went to talk to the personal banker at Barclays (who is a great man and very professional) he told me that if they did not have a passport or drivers license they could bring in two other forms of identification as long as the names matched. This is where I ran into more problems because 2 of the girls had the two forms of identification but their names did not match. One would have their "house" name and the other one would have their "Christian" name.

So now for two of the workers we have to get new identification cards and don't ask me how to do it. I am told that there is only certain times that you can get an id card and it depends on the region. The fun never ends.

For the last three workers, they have just started working so I am going to wait a little while and see if they are going to work out before we open up the account.

So now I am going to show them how to fill out a deposit slip and a withdrawl slip and next week we will continue our weekly budgeting classes. I think that I getting some things done even if it is small, small.