So as mentioned, Katie arrived yesterday! It is nice to finally have someone else to talk and joke
around with while people chat away in Luo. Pamela and I headed out and caught a
mutatu at the road again. This time we managed to get an open air one, that
pretty much was a hatch-back truck with bars around the back to somewhat
enclose it. I actually liked this one best of all because you get lots of fresh
air to keep cool.
We got to the airport with lots of time to spare in the end,
and I had a good chat with Pamela about the bank. She talked a lot about how
grateful she is to the bank, and how big of a difference it has made in her life.
She used to not know anything about saving, and found it hard not to just spend
any money almost as soon as it was earned. Now with the bank, and after going
through the financial curriculum, she saves regularly (so regularly that she
was saving every day that the bank was open, partially because she really
wanted to be the bank ambassador and partially because she wanted to save as
much as possible). She also was able to get a loan the second year that we ran
the microcredit, which she used to open up a store she had been wanting to open
for a long time. It was interesting to hear her talk about how she sees the
bank maybe evolving in time to reach more and more people, and it was very good
at that point to hear from someone directly impacted by the bank. She know
Maurice fairly well and had heard about the board of directors we are hoping to
work towards creating for the bank, and seems to think fairly positively about
it as long as it is run well and transparently...as do we.
Anyways finally Katie arrived and off we went back to Kaguya
(the house / compound we are staying at). It was a lot of fun to take Katie on
her first mutatu ride...the best way to describe it would be the image of a kid
at a candy store! She couldn't stop laughing and smiling or pointing things
out, so I found it quite funny. Once back at the house we showed her around,
let her get settled and shower before having some lunch. Cirpose (and Pamela)
were very excited to meet Katie, the on-going joke with all GIVE travellers has
been that they are our "African Mothers". Having finished lunch we
both headed to the bank, and got to be the first GIVE members to see the new
location. Although the furniture is limited and the decorations even more
limited, there were some freshly painted signs and everything. The location is
now right beside Obambo market and traffic ahs been much higher. Maurice showed
us how everything works on the ground, from opening an account to withdrawing
and depositing money. It is amazing how much busier the bank has been since
moving and there are new clients signing up almost every day that it has been
open.
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| The fancy new bank signs! |
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| The guardian cat (naturally he ignored us) |
We ended up not staying at the bank for all that long since
Katie was feeling pretty out of it, so we headed back and she had a quick nap.
Later that evening, Maurice came over and we got to dig into the project in
more detail. For those of you who haven't heard here is a breif summary of what
we are hoping to do:
The goal, especially after moving to a new location and with
somewhat of a fresh start, is to increase community involvement and engagement
with the bank. We recognise that for the bank to work in the long term,
expertise and ownership will have to be built up in the community. The solution
we are hoping to help facilitate is to elect some kind of council of
representatives (or board of directors) to represent the members. This board
would be able to gather feedback from the clients, in addition to meeting and
discussing any main issues which the bank faces. Then, in the short term the
idea is that they would provide reports on the status of the bank, and
recommendations to GIVE. At this point GIVE would use the recommendations as a
basis point for all of our decisions around the bank. Hopefully this will
increase the level of engagement, and expertise in the village around the bank.
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| Katie with two excited children (and one not so excited one) who live near the bank |
We had been very worried that Maurice could perceive this
board structure as GIVE questioning either his abilities or trustworthiness, so
we wanted to make sure that the air was clear on that end. Our meeting went
very well in the end as we were able to address this fear directly with him. He
even jumped ahead to say that the more he had thought about the board the more
it made sense, for many of the same reasons we were hoping to present to him
ourselves. The meeting was therefore very positive in terms of getting us all
on the same page. We had tried to communicate about this over the phone before
we came, but it is incredible difficult to communicate about such deep issues, across
culture and to some extent language, over the phone. That roadblock being out
of the way we started the first preparations for our time here. We are hoping
to hold some focus groups with as many of the members as possible to learn more
about what direction the members want the bank to go in, and to build support
for increased community ownership (vs. GIVE and Maurice doing most of the
work). After that point the idea will be to collect nominations for the board
positions, before then holding elections for those positions. Once elected,
Katie, Maurice and I hope to be able to train the board on not only the hard skills
(ie. how to audit the books) but also the soft skills (such as around decision
or consensus making) which the position will require. It will be very exciting to see how the project evolves
over our two months here.
Anyways I am actually writing this a day late, having just
completed another day at the bank with Katie, but I will have to call it quits
for now as I am falling asleep. Funny how your perception of time changes (ie.
that it is getting late if you are still up after 9pm!). I will try and post
something tomorrow morning (our time) to update what happened today (our first
full project based day I suppose).
Hope all is well with you wherever you may be,
Graham
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