Getting caught up

Hello everyone!

Hope that you all had a pleasant week. This week was an exciting one for the project as we got to meet all the board members and start their training! As I will explain later, the reasons for not posting in so long was that all of our training sessions got moved ahead a few days, and we have been very busy trying to keep up with that as a result.

The first meeting was held on Monday in the afternoon. Things started off a little slowly as we hadn’t realised how much longer it would take with a translator (combined with the often long winded way of talking in Luo) and because most people showed up 30 minutes late. Thankfully they generally enjoyed our “icebreaker” activities to introduce everyone. Ours consisted of us passing around a roll of toilet paper for everyone to take a few pieces while they told everyone else their name, village, why they took on the position and answered the question: if you could be any animal, what would it be and why. The animals and reasons given were very interesting. Two people would be cows so that they could produce milk to support everyone, and one of the board members said she would be a hen to make eggs that she could sell. Two of them said that they would be rabbits because they are smart. One of my favourite answers was to be a giraffe so that she could look far ahead and to plan.  My favourite answer however was to be a lion so that he could protect the bank from any danger. Once we had gone around the circle we then informed everyone that they would have to share one skill they would bring to the board, for each square of toilet paper they had taken before. Unfortunately because everyone took at least 10-12 squares we had to limit the number at 4. They thought it quite funny that they had all taken so many pieces.

The rest of the training session worked through explaining some of the boring process stuff that we had to get out of the way before getting into the role of the board for the year ahead. Based off their questions we could tell that this was the part that they were most interested in, and they seemed to appreciate the balance we struck between detail and ambiguity about their roles. We don’t want to make their roles too defined so that it seems like a chore, but rather to give them some space to keep their position engaging and fulfilling.

The rest of the meeting was spent working through some brainstorming around the best ways of interacting with members, and working through their first case: The Tea Situation. I believe I wrote up about this in one of my earlier posts but as a refresher, we struggle with what may seem like a very minor issue. GIVE generally provides tea at all of our training sessions to the attendees, but we have found that giving the tea can create a sense of entitlement and impact the engagement of the participants as a result. Our hope was to encourage the board members to work together with us to provide all the ‘ingredients’ for us to make tea together. The impact of giving tea would be small, but the hope was that the impact of us withholding tea and working together to make tea for ourselves would have a much bigger, positive impact. We are hoping that the board can work with us towards making the bank self-sustainable, and were hoping that this would send a positive message in that regard. So, to try and get to this position of everyone working together to provide tea, we wrote a case about Frank the miller. The gist of the story was that he was trying to get the farmers to try a new idea, combining their harvests, to create bigger batches for him to mill and hence reduce his costs. The hope was that by working through the case they would see the benefits of working together, and the challenges of changing what people are accustomed to. The board nailed the case, providing solutions to our questions that were even better than some of our answers. However, when we presented our “Tea Situation” to them, they all laughed and unanimously rejected our idea of coming together to provide tea. Oh well, we tried!

After a break, with some music and attempts by Katie and myself at Kenyan dancing, we returned to our session. There was not much left at this point as we went through the brainstorm I mentioned earlier, before discussing the training schedule. Unfortunately, there was a conflict with our last planned session due to a church event and we are planning to go on a safari the week following the training...so we had to move all of our training sessions ahead by a few days. This was not ideal in the slightest for us, since it takes on average roughly 10-12 hours to fully prepare each training session, and we were only expecting to have two sessions our first week, not three. However, the ‘customer’ is always right, and it made the most sense to make those changes so we will have to make due.

We finished the first session by getting the board members to teach us something in Luo. We decided upon learning how to count, so that we wouldn’t get ripped off by people at the market as often, which they thought was quite funny! They also thought it was hilarious to hear us trying to learn the numbers, and it will be one of my goals to completely learn them before the end of the training sessions.

Following the training session we were quite pleased with how it had gone. The board members seem to all be very competent and intelligent leaders in the community who are very committed to the bank. They also seem to respond well to our attempted teaching style. We are certainly learning a lot as we go considering that neither of us has run training sessions such as these before, let alone for the board of directors of a bank. Thankfully we have good bodies of knowledge to fall back on in the form of my camp staff training experience, Katie’s parents and my own parents, in addition to our GIVE support team back in Canada and the UK. The other members of the house have also been very helpful at providing a fresh set of eyes and opinions on various aspects of our training which we have been struggling with.

Anyways we spent a good dinner that evening catching up with the rest of the travellers before getting back to work on the upcoming training sessions for much of the night and the next day. We have been working hard but also making sure to save some time for reading, exploring, and hanging out with the other travellers. Our dinner table discussions continue to be interesting and continue to cover vast subject areas. Still, all being said we are really looking forward to our day off this weekend. I am especially looking forward to it because Shahzad and Karim are coming to Kisumu, so I will hopefully be able to meet up with them for a few hours. (They were my host family in Nairobi)

I will leave my rambling story at this point; to hopefully then get you all fully caught up this afternoon.

Best,

Graham

Elections complete!

Hello again everyone,

Phew, what a busy week. We managed to finish off all the elections yesterday evening and 'announce' the results. Just over 67% of the members came out to vote so it was all very exciting, and we are happy with the people who were chosen.

Hard at work at the bank

Some of the children keeping up company at the bank

I am losing track of time a little bit so I will just run you through what generally happened this week before sharing a few specific stories. Wednesday as I mentioned was spent doing more elections at the bank, before powering through some more preparations for the board training sessions coming up next week. Thursday, Katie and I headed into town in the morning to see the bank where we deposit the member savings, do some more photocopying of ballots, buying some project supplies and picking up some groceries (including cake supplies for Allie's birthday on Friday). While there we actually bumped into Maurice as he was depositing the previous week's savings. Unfortunately things can take much longer to finish here than we are used to so all three of us ended up getting back to the bank later than we had expected. The mutatu we caught back was not very full, and so when we stopped off at Kisian (the junction / fork in the road before heading past Kaguya and Obambo) to get more people. We were on time at this point...but over 30 minutes later once the mutatu had filled up we finally left. It was a little frustrating because there was nothing we could have done, but thankfully the members who had showed up on time to vote were okay waiting around until we (and eventually Maurice) got to the bank.

More of the local children, they are much more photogenic than I!

Keeping us company at the bank

Later that afternoon we had a phone call with our friend Ashfan, who we were put in contact with through Liz, to get some feedback on the board and how things were going. Ash is very intelligent and perceptive so his feedback was very useful as always (thankfully he liked everything we were doing, so mostly just had small suggestions and words of encouragement). It is pretty cool how 'international' our team is with Liz and Diane helping us from Vancouver, Ash helping us from the UK (He is studying at LSE, I think working on his masters) and then we are in Kenya working with Maurice and the other community members.

Me being serious

Helping Will with his writing

Friday was the first bank day of the week so we were at the bank from 9 until almost 6 getting people signed in to vote and deposit. That evening we enjoyed a nice candlelit dinner (since the power was out again), which included some fish which Maurice had given to Allie for her birthday. It was all very tasty, and Maurice ended up coming over to have some food and share the story of how he met Irene, his wife. We have the whole story on video, and it was a good one, so I will have to put it up sometime. He was saying that he saw her one time when he was visiting a friend of his who happened to be Irene's uncle (or something along those lines), and from the moment he laid eyes on her, he thought that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. From then on he was determined to see and talk with her whenever he could. After a few years of them still not actually dating but keeping in touch, she moved to Nairobi. Maurice was devastated, especially as cellphones were not very common in Kenya at that time. He managed to somehow get a phone, and find out the phone number of the uncle she was staying with, and they would sneak in phone calls whenever they could. Eventually after another year or so of this, she came back and finally agreed to meet his family. The story was not over at that point however, as he still had to finally propose. The way it is done here is by the hopeful husband going to the woman's house and asking to see her. At this point all of her family can ask the hopeful husband whatever questions they can of him which he must answer to their satisfaction. Once through they asked Maurice why he is there again, he responded that he deeply loved their daughter Irene and wanted to marry her. Then Irene was allowed to come out and was asked by her family if she knew who this man was, and why Maurice had come, to which she responded that he was the man she loved and that Maurice had come to marry her. Then that was that, quite the story and courtship that lasted nearly 6 years, and although he said it was very tough, he is clearly happy now so I am sure he thinks it was worth it.


My story telling pales in comparison to his version, but hopefully I did it some justice! Reminds me a little of my own parent's story (although the specific details of their story always seem to change!).

Snyder, Evans' sister, and Evans

Once Maurice headed home, we enjoyed some sangria, music and cake to celebrate Allie's 19th birthday. Not often we get to spend a birthday in Kenya so that was fun. The next day (yesterday) we had the last day of elections! It was pretty exciting, as we had just under 50% of the members having already voted. Things started out a little slowly in terms of voters, but we had a steady rotation of children coming by to keep us company. We ended up working with a couple on their writing by writing out short phrases and then having them re-write them. One of them had pretty good writing, it was even better than mine! (which doesn't actually say much). We also hung out with a new friend I had made earlier in the week: Evans. Evans is a very interesting character, he works as a tailor in the village at his mother's store. They grew up in the village but lived in Nairobi for a few years when he was younger. Following the violence during the elections of 2007/2008 in the capital, they moved back and set up shop in Obambo. Evans is 16 now, but first met Maurice 3 years ago at one of the annual HIV soccer tournaments which GIVE has been running. He still has 4 years of high school left but has run out of money to pay for it (the cost is roughly 7000 shillings a year for school, which is pretty cost prohibitive for most people). He is very kind to all of the younger children when they hang out with us, and is clearly very bright based off the questions he has been asking us. Katie and I are thinking we may get him to make us some dresses and dress shirts respectively (which we wanted to do at some point anyways). We want to help him with his school fees but know that it would be difficult to do that and not send the wrong message. Our thought right now is to see how things go, and maybe when we get him to make those clothes we might 'tip' him for his good work. Will have to keep thinking on it though.

Evans' mother working in the store (Taken by Evans himself)

In Evans' store

Anyways the elections finished up that afternoon, although they dragged on a little later into the day than we had hoped, with nearly 40 people coming between 4-6pm (after the bank was supposed to be closed). Then, as it was getting dark and starting to rain we counted the final votes. Thankfully Pamela got in, receiving 107 votes out of a possible 188 (still need to check the exact number of votes cast, but it is something like that). We got to congratulate her today, and she was clearly very happy! The other board members see to be solid choices, so now we can look forward to our first training session on Monday with them. Maurice was a little disappointed that 4 /6 of the board members are from Kagoo, the biggest village, but they were one of the best villages for voting (in terms of % who came to vote) so it's not surprising. We gave the opportunity for village representative to 4 villages and only Kagoo took advantage of it, so we have no problems with the result.


Alright I should probably call it quits at that, we are going to head into town to pick up some more groceries (it's hard to buy enough food to last for 7 people!) and some more project supplies for Monday's training. Hope all is well with you,

 Graham

Another few days in Kenya

Hello everyone!

Osaore! (Good afternoon), idhi nadi? (how are you doing?)

Sorry again for the delay in posting, it has somehow managed to get even busier both in terms of our project and with 3 more of the girls having arrived (finally) on Monday. The gender imbalance is getting worse! 6:1 is a large difference, but I hope to be more than up to the task of representing my gender. The dinner topics have been both funny and interesting but there have been a few times where our discussion has tended towards a few topics which I otherwise rarely talk about (such as polygamy and abortion).

On Sunday we got up early again in anticipation of the 3 girls from the education team arriving, only to get a text later in the afternoon that their bags had not made it to Nairobi! So they decided to spend the night in Nairobi after touring around with a friend of theirs. When I say friend, it was a guy Simon whom has taken a number of GIVE travellers on safaris in the past and had offered to show them around Nairobi. Apparently he is very nice and fun to be around so we may try to organise a safari for Katie and I with him if the timing works out.

In the morning we prepared for the nominee meeting that afternoon and went over the member list one last time to make sure it was accurate. At the nominee meeting we had good turnout, Maurice had told people that it started at 1 (actually started at 3) so some people got there around 1 and were a little unhappy with Maurice for the meeting being so late. A number of the nominees were playing in a netball tournament just down the road and has to leave early for their games. Out of the 25 remaining nominees, 22 showed up (a couple were later than others) and we were able to run them through everything we wanted to say. They had a lot of questions about the election process, but thankfully we were fairly well prepared. The process of deciding a tie came up and we needed to confirm what we had been planning more or less on the spot but now (a few days later) we are happy with what we have come up with. We also managed to get pictures of all the nominees so that the community members would be able to better recognise everyone which was a fun experience: smiling in a picture must not be the norm here, there were a lot of very serious faces!

No serious faces here though!

Lisa (L) and Victoria (R) as taken by Bridget

 Following the meeting we headed home for dinner, where I joined Victoria and Lisa in spending some quality time with the local children (see pictures below). Them being nutritionists it was very enlightening (and sad) to see the impact poor nutrition was having on a couple of the children. One of the babies was very swollen, weak and small for his age, which they believe has been caused by not receiving enough milk from his mother. Nutrition issues are tough though as it is difficult to directly approach the mother around that issue as it is pretty personal and would not immediately solve the problem. We believe that the mother works all day away from the house which has led to the baby not receiving enough milk from her. Pamela and Syprose have agreed to do some more research for us though and hopefully point the mother in the right direction.

The baby suffering from the swelling. He is 8 months old I think?

My new best friends

After dinner (complemented by a glass of beer or wine) we called Liz to hear her feedback on all 17 pages of the advanced board training document we had created for the first session. As usual her advice was very useful and we managed to work through a variety of issues around how to present the results, continue engagement with the non-elected nominees and determine Maurice’s role within the board, in addition to the training document itself. The reception was really bad, we didn’t have any power (at the house, in our laptops nor our phones) so the meeting got broken up a lot with our phones dropping the call or from us adding minutes borrowed from Victoria / Lisa. We ended up waking early on Monday to finish our meeting. Well worth all the work though.

On Monday the 3 girls: Allie, Chaviva and Sarah, finally arrived! The 4 of us who were already here headed out towards town to pick up groceries and supplies, although I got off early at the airport to help retrieve our lost travellers. They had a lot of bags, wow. To be fair to them though two big hockey bags they had were full of soccer balls and jerseys for the soccer tournament, and they brought over a lot of other supplies for their project such as posters and craft supplies. We somehow managed to fit into a mutatu after some shuffling around of everyone, and off we headed back to Kaguya. They get to occupy the other house by themselves for now, until more travellers arrive during the second week of June.

Once Victoria, Lisa and Katie returned from their town visit (all loaded up with more supplies) we took the new girls into Obambo to meet Maurice and to pick up some mandazi. We were however surprised by Syprose and Pamela with some mandazi as a welcome to Kenya present for Chaviva, Allie and Sarah. Thankfully we managed to hide the mandazi we had purchased just in time! The ones they made were much tastier...still warm from being cooked. They were amazed at how quickly we polished off two big bowls of them. At this point the new girls started to fade having only had a few hours of sleep the previous night:

Group power nap

 That night, as mentioned we had some enjoyable conversation as the power went out again for an extended period of time. However, none of us were opposed to having a candlelit dinner with everyone together, before Katie and I powered through some more board training prep and I finished preparing all the stuff we would need for the elections the next day.

Tuesday morning I got up early for a run and some yoga. I had been getting lazy about running so it felt a lot better, especially for my digestion which seems to appreciate me going for a run (keeps my appetite high). Once Katie got up we did some final prep for the elections that day and had a big communal breakfast with everyone. I reiterate that I don’t think I have ever drunk so much tea as I have while here! (No complaints there) before heading to the bank. We set up our election system with the ballot box, ballots, laptop with nominee pictures and a flip chart with all the criteria people had brought up in the focus groups. We got a large swarm of people at once at the start though, so we had some minor hicups in making sure that the voting was well run (people all crowded around while the first couple people voted, and we found out after a few voters that Maurice didn’t actually understand how the ballots worked. Thankfully only a couple voters were affected and they still filled in valid ballots. Once we cleared up all the confusion and got the hang of things everything ran smoothly enough to let us watch some Lion King with a few of the children again (they now know who Simba and Nyala are) We managed to get 33 votes cast in the first day (out of roughly 270 members), which is pretty good considering that there was a big market on in one of the other villages and it was the first day. Hopefully the next day will be even better.

Time for some Lion King (singing along more than welcome)

 Although we have been working hard to publicly remain completely impartial, we are secretly pretty happy with the voting so far too (in that Pamela has been getting tons of votes!). Once the voting was complete we picked up some more of the bikes that are getting repaired and headed home for some dinner (again in the candlelight since the power went out again. Katie and I finished off rough drafts of the board training for two more of the sessions. We are getting closer to being complete (if we ever do really finish them!).

Okay that should be enough rambling for now. I am writing this Wednesday morning as we are about to have some lunch and head out for day 2 of the elections. Very excited! I don’t think I missed anything too major in my story...except from being woken up at 5ish this morning by frightened versions of Lisa and Victoria. They were convinced that there was some mad bat or animal (that probably had rabies) lose in their room and had moved out to the living room. I somehow managed to incorporate all the commotion into my own dream and thus didn’t wake up until Katie started asking them what was happening. (turns out it was just a massive moth that had a damaged wing).

Until next time,

Graham

"Hey Mum, when was I born?"

Hi Everyone,
First of all, apologies for taking so long to post, I have been pretty busy recently and now that a few more people have come I have to be considerate and share the internet stick. Life is rough I know.

So to get caught up, Thursday was spent finishing up the focus groups. We had 2 final ones which we managed to get through before relaxing with some mandazi and soda. At each focus group we would introduce ourselves and we have gotten the attendees to name themselves which has been very interesting. The tribe that lives in the area we are staying in, the Luo, have 3 names that make up their full name. The first name is given to them by their parents, and the last name is either their father's last name or the middle name of their husband (in the case of a woman). The middle name reflects how and when they were born (literally). For example Maurice's full name is Maurice Otieno Amoke. Amoke was his fathers name and Otieno is "boy who was born in the evening".They have a variety of different potential middle names: Akoth for example means "girl born in the rain", Anyango means "girl born in the morning". (Girls have their middle name start with an "a", boys with an "o"). It is surprisingly specific though as some of the time bands are only a couple hours long. Some other names (which I forget what they are) can be for: someone born during a famine, someone born upside down, someone born in the afternoon. It is odd since it is such a personal detail about someone that you share with the world, but I have grown to like it.

Anyways getting back to the focus groups, Maurice decided that Katie and I needed to get some Luo names. Unfortunately I had no recollection of when I was born, so I guessed the morning hours. Maurice then told me to introduce myself as Graham Onyango. The only problem was that I forgot what name he had given me and said Graham Otieno when I was introducing myself...and now its too late to switch. Especially since I have introduced myself that way to probably close to 80 people now, it has started to stick. We were in town and saw a few people from the village and stopped to say hi. Naturally they started out by saying "Otieno! How are you?", so there is no going back now! Sorry Mum! I found out last night that I was born at 4am while it was snowing out...which I don't think they have a name for.

Okay so since the focus groups finished, Katie and I were tasked with a massive overhaul of our board training plan, which had only consisted of an outline with all the activities we wanted to do, but no details on how to do them or detailed descriptions of each detail's purpose. We started to crack open that nut while preparing for Friday since 2 girls from the Food Security and Nutrition Team were arriving (early in the morning). We did a bit of a clean up and some decorating at Kaguya (ie. putting up the calendar), plus balanced out all our expenses.

On Friday we got woken up at around 6 with a call from Victoria and Lisa that they had just got their ticket and were going to board the flight to Kisumu from Nairobi. They had 'slept' over at the airport the night before but hadn't been sure which flight they could get on. I say slept, but don't think they actually accomplished much sleeping. We then met them at the airport and brought them back to get settled, shower, and meet Maurice. Once they met Maurice at the bank we headed into town with them to pick up all the groceries. Katie and I had drawn them down pretty far so we were in need of a lot of food, especially as our number was increasing dramatically from 2 to 7! Thankfully Katie and I know our way around pretty well now (in terms of the places we need to go) and the trip didn't take too long. We did take up a lot of room on the mutatu on the way back though.

Once home the two girls took a quick nap while Katie and I did some more board training work. We were both feeling a little overwhelmed with the task of developing an effective board training, motivation system for the year and a phase out plan for the next 5 years of the bank. Big issues which neither of us have ever dealt with before! That being said we worked through a lot of the higher level thinking around the board training that day, and reached out to a few people for some advice. Katie's father was especially helpful as he got us to think about re-framing the 'training' as an educational certification, which could then be built upon during the year. The idea of continuous personal progression as a motivational tool for the board members while we are not here is appealing and hopefully stronger than trying to create a sense of responsibility to the community (which is hard to influence, and probably already fairly strong). With education being such a prized accomplishment here, we are hoping to make their educational progress fairly public or physically recognised (ie. through a certificate). All of this is still in the development stages so who knows how it will change.

We managed to power through a lot of work which we hope to work through with our exec: Liz, Sunday night. Although Bridget really wanted us to come out and play with her and her friends! Earlier that day we had picked up some Tusker (the best known African beer) and had a one or two each while we worked which seemed to help us tone down the stressful parts of developing the board training. After all our work we are feeling a lot more comfortable about it now.

Come play!

In between our working sessions we had a very pleasant dinner with our new housemates: Victoria and Lisa. They are both easy to talk with, and very knowledgeable nutritionists so Katie and I were able to find out a lot through constantly asking questions! For example apparently drinking orange juice when you eat spinach massively increases your absorption of iron. Who knew?

In brief, Saturday was spent doing some more work and hanging out with Victoria and Lisa. We were all given a bit of a scare since 3 more girls were supposed to arrive...and had agreed over email the day before to call us when they knew what time their flight was as they were sleeping over at Nairobi as well. Unfortunately we didn't find out until later that evening (almost 12 hours after we had been planning on meeting them) that they were leaving a day later, after we asked Katie's mum (who had met up with one of them). We couldn't figure out what could have happened, so that was relieving.

Oh and the best part of the day (naturally) occurred when we saw some more monkeys stealing a snack from the mango tree on the property:

Cheeky Monkey

Aside from working and waiting around for them, Katie and I went into the bank to close out the nominations, and then took the nominee forms to the chief to get looked over. There were many duplicates so it took a while to finalise the list while making sure we hadn't missed anyone. We are very glad that we talked with the chief though, as he took 4 (of our 29) nominees out of the running for various reasons such as their past history, or close affiliation with a group that has caused us trouble in the past. Aside from that we had a long dinner with Lisa and Victoria talking for hours about anything and everything...which is always fun.

I am writing this Sunday morning as we wait (again) to hear from those 3 girls. It will be relieving once we finally hear from them. Katie and I will be meeting with Maurice later before holding a nominee meeting at the bank to run over a few things and to finalise the list (anyone who forgets / doesn't show up is off the ballot) before hopefully having a phone call with Liz. Should be a busy day but I am looking forward to it.
I think that's all for now,
Best,
Graham

Phasing out, rain and financial services

Hello everyone,

As I mentioned a few days ago, Katie and I have been working on developing a document around how GIVE’s involvement with the bank will adjust over time. This question has been getting asked of us by some clients and by Maurice, so we felt it was important to be prepared.

Financially, GIVE currently pays for all the fees related to the bank: the rent, Maurice’s salary, the trips to town to deposit the savings, all the photocopying, and has also footed the capital required for the microfinance project and to pay for the financial curriculum. The hope is that through time the bank will transition towards being completely self-sufficient and sustainable. It has been interesting at the focus groups to see how optimistic the clients are about the bank, although most of it will probably not be possible. For example every focus group wants the bank to become much bigger, offer loans, have no fees, offer interest on savings and have many branches that employ people (and have computers). We are pleased that they are ambitious but some goals may conflict as they all will require money, and a lot of effort.

The hope is that we can get the board this year to start thinking around how the bank can realistically move forward towards those goals. We are still in the planning stages but the idea is that GIVE will continue to support the bank financially as before for another year, with the board having to find sources of revenue or capital to start up the financial curriculum or microfinance again. When asked about paying a fee for the financial curriculum in the past, members have indicated that they would be willing to pay one. We have also had a few members ask about using the community savings to fund the microfinance. Therefore we do not see this as a big leap of faith in either case.

In future years we hope that the board will first be able to find ways to pay for the fees associated with opening an account (ie. Paying for the passbook and photocopying), in addition to the costs associated with depositing or withdrawing savings (ie. The trip to town). Eventually the hope is that the bank will get to the point of being able to pay for the building, any other bank supplies and bank officer salaries, but that will probably come at some point in the future.

There are many options for raising the required money such as account opening fees, periodic membership fees, withdrawal charges, any interest earned from the external bank account where member savings are currently stored, fundraising for specific investments, and using the interest earned from microcredit. All of these options have their benefits and shortcomings so the bank will likely eventually use a combination of them. It is our hope that it will largely be the board’s discretion around which to use and how to use them. For example we are hoping to steer the bank away from over leveraging the member savings in order to make enough money to pay for everything off lending alone since this is risky and shifts the focus away from savings (which have been shown to be more effective at reducing poverty).

In terms of responsibility, the idea is that the board will be meeting monthly to discuss any issues that come up around the bank and provide recommendations to GIVE around those issues or other potential changes. Once the report from that meeting is delivered to GIVE, we will then take time to meet and discuss their recommendations, after which GIVE will make a decision and provide the reasoning behind the decision to the board. The hope is that this will build knowledge on the board about what goes into our decision making, such that they will be prepared in the future to make similar decisions without GIVE’s input.

We will hopefully also be getting the board to draft a monthly budget, to learn about financial planning for the bank, and to perform audits of the bank activity at various points throughout the year which can be checked by future years’ travellers.

My dad recently sent me a couple very interesting articles about microfinance. The first one I will talk about in another post, but the second one is more pertinent to this post. The article: “Latest Findings from Randomized Evaluations of Microfinance” re-examined how different financial services can impact the poor.

It was interesting as the article was critical around much of the praise that microfinance (usually referring in fact to microcredit) receives for increasing income and employment. It referenced a number of studies showing that the impact of microcredit is much more nuanced as it helps create more businesses, but has only minimal impacts on employment levels. The bigger impact on people’s lives come from the changes it can create in consumption patterns towards more durable goods rather than ‘temptation goods’ such as cigarettes and alcohol. Microcredit has also struggled to push businesses past a small-medium size as they cannot quite qualify for loans from larger institutions yet are too big for traditional MFI (Microfinance Institutions).

It also looked into how the specific details or services of microcredit can be important. Traditional microcredit uses group lending because of the peer pressure it can create to not default, yet there have been a number of studies recently that show the default rates to only be marginally lower with group lending, yet uptake levels are also much lower. The authors argue that this is because more risk-averse potential clients do not want to be liable for other people’s risk. The next service of note was the concept of delayed repayment. The authors referenced a number of studies which had found that people take out larger loans than required and hold back some of the loan money simply to make sure that they can pay the early dues before they receive the return on investment (since traditional microcredit has very strict repayment dates that are usually either bi-weekly or monthly). One study had found that the ultimate profitability of the businesses supported was on average much higher where the first payment was delayed for 2 months, but that more defaults also occurred from the investments not working out. The recommendation was to try offering higher interest rates for the delayed service packages to discourage their use unless it is worthwhile for the client.

Getting back to our project and the microfinance we have done in the past (27 total borrowers with no defaults), one of the keys to success mentioned in the article is being selective, which we have managed to be so far. It will be interesting to see how that can be maintained over time. The other part of the article I found most closely related to our project was around different saving systems and their effectiveness. The article referenced a number of studies showing how goal based saving, potentially even with separate accounts for different uses, can be very effective at increasing savings rates. While doing our audit this year we discovered that a number of parents had opened accounts basically ‘in trust’ for their children. So that will hopefully be something we can institutionalise going forward. It also mentioned how important saving can be for protecting a client’s money from the daily demands of needy relatives or friends, which was something we have been hearing a lot during the focus groups (that it is hard to save within the house).

Anyways that is all my rambling for now, we finished up another (couple) days of focus groups, with two more tomorrow and then we are done! Almost there...they are getting a little repetitive now. Other than we got to experience some pretty crazy rain during the second focus group of the day:

Just another rainy day in Kanyawegi...no big deal

Also Katie and I are looking forward to some more GIVE members arriving this weekend (except that we will have to stop acting like slobs around the house *sigh*)

Cheers,

Graham

Death by focus group

Hello everyone,

So as the title suggests Katie and I have been having our fill of focus groups! What originally started out as an idea to occupy a couple days while we got settled and learnt more about the community has turned into a protracted affair. It has been very good to get to meet more of the clients and to hear first-hand how they envision the (bright) future of the bank. It is also cool because we are now being recognised by more people around the village. That being said, 11 focus groups are far more than the few we had planned for originally.

We managed to get through 3 on Monday and then 2 today, and all so far have seemed happy with the idea of a board of directors. I just wanted to share a few thoughts on how they have been going and what insights it has given us into the community.

First of all, we have now had the pleasure of experiencing how little regard the people of the village have for time. Today for example we started our focus group over an hour and a half late because people had been so slow to get there! I thought I was bad at being on time! It was interesting though as one person showed up ~30 minutes past 9, when the meeting was supposed to start so she was hanging out with us for around an hour. Not long before we started I got our translator Joseph to ask her if she found it frustrating that she had to wait for everyone, but she said it didn’t bother her and even seemed confused by the question. In one of the focus groups about 3 people individually showed up nearly 2 and a half hours after the original planned / advertised starting time. Maurice did make a good point that they rarely have to keep time though unless they work a steady full time job while it does not matter as much if they are an entrepreneur or farmer.

To kill time we had some fun showing Maurice some planet earth while we waited...We decided to start by showing him Ice Worlds (saying that it was like this in Canada sometimes). It was funny to see his reaction to penguins and also to whales. He was struggling to comprehend the size of the whales (as I am sure we all in reality do).

Maurice doing some translations for us before we got down to watching some Planet Earth

Second of all I have found it interesting to see for ourselves how religious the community is. Every single meeting we have had has opened and closed with a prayer, and every single time we have asked about what criteria they want in a board member they have answered: to be God fearing. Thankfully Maurice has been able to steer them towards God fearing rather than saying they must be Christian, especially since there are a number of Muslims that also live in the region.

Another interesting thing of note is how each focus group so far has said that the people on the board must be a) not corrupt and b) not a politician. Politics must have a bad reputation in the area. They have all said that it is important that they in the community must love each other if they are to reach their goals for the bank. Speaking of those goals...they are quite ambitious! A couple so far have envisioned the bank becoming a national, commercial bank, within 10 years. They see it offering interest on their savings, loans with low interest rates and with no deductions...that provides support to orphans in the community. It will be interesting to see how those goals are brought forward and discussed by the board once we have it assembled.

Maurice leading a focus group through the nomination form

All criticisms aside (which are mostly from the focus groups getting repetitive after doing far too many of them!) it has been very motivating to see how important the bank has been to many of the member’s lives since it was created. A few members I have talked to have said how it used to be impossible to save or plan for the future since any money stored in the house gets put towards the immediate needs of everyone, rather than saved for a goal. Our housekeeper Pamela (who was last year’s bank ambassador) was talking about how it has changed her views on money and what can be done with it, even allowing her to open the business she always wanted to open. From talking with her and Maurice, she seems to have a very supportive husband too, which is always good to hear.

Anyways today, after our second focus group finished, Maurce Katie and I all headed up to Holo. Tuesday is market day at Holo, and we were able to pick up some much needed food including some cabbage, green peppers, rice, tomatoes and of course some mangos. Yum. Thankfully one of the community health workers, who has worked closely with GIVE for a while now, offered to help us with our purchases (such that we wouldn’t get ripped off). That certainly saved us some time, and allowed Katie and I to try some lentil samosas that were delicious.

Holo Market

Holo Market