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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 June 23, 2007 11:41 AM
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