June 23, 2007
Mwenge English class and Microfinance Market Research
So the big news around here is that the Tanzanian National Football team (the Taifa Stars) beat Burkina Faso (1-0) in Ougadougou this weekend. If they beat Mozambique in September, they will proceed to the African Cup of Nations in Ghana in 2008. Needless to say, the Taifa Stars victory is quite a big deal and the team was even greeted with a heroes' welcome at the airport and invited to Parliament.
Besides working for FINCA, I have also been pursuing some of the projects that I was working on last year. I work with a community of Makonde wood carvers in a neighborhood called Mwenge. In 2004, the artists founded an English school which meets nightly in the market. Most of the teachers are foreign students from the nearby University of Dar es Salaam. Going to teach at Mwenge is my favorite part of the day. The carvers have taught me most of my Kiswahili and a lot of what I know about Tanzania and I was so happy to return after six months away to see how much some of my students had progressed. We try to focus on communication skills with a focus on how to talk to the foreign tourists who come to the market to buy sculptures.
The class is facing some challenges because there is a conflict between the national artists' association and the students over control and management of the class. All the students have been asked to write a formal letter of application and the teachers have been asked to draft a 'curriculum plan' that includes a provision for a test that allows people to 'graduate' from the class and move onto other adult education programs. The fundamental question that presents itself in codifying the policies and practice of the class is "How do we, as a community, set up a more formal and permanent framework without sacrificing the flexibility, openness and warmth that currently define the class?"
After some conversations with both students and co-teachers, I strongly disagree with the idea that there is some limit to what the students can learn from the class. Despite the fact that all of them are very poor and many live very far away and have families of their own, the carvers show an amazing amount of dedication and courage by showing up to class every single day. Most of the students have only been able to complete primary school but often articulate how important they believe education is and how much they would have liked to continue studying. Hopefully, we will be able to find some resolution with the national artists' association and all of our students will be able to continue studying.
I am also working with a co-operative called Ukombozi Art which we founded in 2006 to connect the carvers directly with lucrative foreign markets. Our website can be found at www.ukomboziart.com where you can read about our history and even view some of our products currently for sale in the US.
Working at FINCA is also going well. I helped prepare some of the new marketing materials and also worked on a presentation for an exhibition with the US embassy next week. I have been working out of the headquarters for the last two weeks and will hopefully soon start to travel to some of the branches up-country to do some market research and help one of the branch managers become more comfortable with the monthly performance reporting process.
The current buzz in microfinance is shifting to a market-driven model driven more by a greater concern for customer satisfaction and efficient service-delivery. Microsave (a Kenyan consulting firm) has developed a really great microfinance qualitative market research methodology, which will hopefully facilitate a greater understanding of the customers needs and the attributes they look for in choosing financial services. This is important not only because microfinance itself has become a competitive industry but also because MFIS (microfinance institutions) must also compete with informal financial services (like local money lenders and rotating savings schemes), SACCOS (savings and credit co-operative societies), and even the practice of borrowing money from friends and family.
I am really excited to dive into some of the research activities, but as I have discovered, developing appropriate research methods is extremely important to the quality of the research findings and I don't want to rush into it unprepared.
Posted by Julia Hazen at 11:41 AM | TrackBack
June 11, 2007
Karibu Dar es Salaam
Hello blog readers,
This summer I am working for a microfinance organization called FINCA Tanzania. FINCA Tanzania is affiliated with the American organization FINCA International, based in Washington DC. FINCA Tanzania has been operating since 1998 and has over 37,000 clients across the country. Specifically, this summer I will be doing market research on ways to improve service delivery and customer service to increase client satisfaction. I will be visiting various branches of the bank across Tanzania talking to clients, branch managers etc. to try and get an idea about their experience with FINCA and how it could be improved. One reason that this is an important thing to think about because micro-finance is a competitive market and FINCA is trying to establish itself as the market leader in Tanzania.
Today is my first day and I met Robert (my boss), the chief operating officer, Jason (the managing director and fellow Brunonian) and a ton of other people in the office. I have been trying to learn all I can about FINCA's policies, procedures and products before I launch myself into the field in a couple of weeks. Everything seems pretty straight-forward and clear-cut now, but knowing this city and the way things actually happen, I can only imagine some of the challenges that FINCA loan officers face in actually implementing the policies.
Perhaps a few words on Dar es Salaam are in order. I spent six months here last year and absolutely love this city. Dar es Salaam is the economic, cultural and social capital of Tanzania (although technically not the political capital) and by far the largest city in the country. No one is exactly sure of how many people live here but estimates say between 3.5 and 5 million people. Also, Dar, like many cities across Africa and the developing world, is growing at an incredibly fast rate, perhaps around 400,000 people a year. Dar's growth is fueled by rural-urban migration or people leaving the very difficult conditions of village life in search of economic opportunity and better access to services (such as health and education) in the city. Many of these migrants are men, who leave their families at home. Consequently, driving around the city, you see a tremendous amount of young men everywhere, many just sort of lounging around in the shade and also selling things at traffic lights.
Dar is a bit of a crazy and complicated place. Dar is busy cultivating a cosmopolitan image as a regional hub and the changes are visible almost everywhere. The most notable is the recent construction of Mlimani City, the second largest mall in Sub-Saharan Africa (which is (in)conveniently located down the street from my house). It was finished in November when it only had two big stores and I went back the other day and was totally blown away. Walking into Mlimani City is like walking literally on dusty dirt roads with enormous potholes and piles of trash lying everywhere into any shopping mall in suburban America. They have since added a really fancy cinema, tons of clothes and electronics stores etc. The mall (and other places like it in the city) are really changing people's consumption habits around the city-in Shoprite, they were selling imported fruits in a country that grows of tons of delicious fruit. I saw a little girl and her dad buying all this Barbie stuff.
Maybe the best way to describe this city is an anecdote which some of you have inevitably heard before, but to me, really captures the city. So, when you are riding in a bus downtown, you come out upon the most magnificient vista of the turquoise Indian ocean, the permanently blue skies and bright sun with white beaches and fancy houses stretched out along the bay...Then, all of a sudden, you are hit with the most awful smell in the entire world, like trash, rotting something, low tide....And it never ceases to surprise me when it happens-I am always so taken by the scenery that I am always taken off guard when the smell rudely hits me in the face.
So I gues thats Dar and my job in a little nutshell-I will write again soon once I get a chance to get really into the work at hand.
