Posts filed under 'Togo'
On the Road
By Nick Malouin, KF9, Togo
There’s something about traveling at high speeds in Africa that allows the mind to open up and do its best thinking. Maybe with the pot holes and daily frustrations left behind the brain can finally concentrate on something else. I had such an experience on a recent weekend trip to Lomé. Traveling at 60km/h, I had two hours to take in the beautiful scenery between Kpalimé and Lomé. The villages, usually a cacophony of noise and activity, had the brief illusion of serenity.
I started thinking about earlier that day when I met a client selling motor oil on the side of the road. His stand had looked like every other motor oil stand in Kpalimé and you might think for a second that it was part of a chain. The fact is though with only certain inputs available (wood boards) and zero money to invest, all merchant stands, whether selling vegetables, pagne or motor oil, look exactly the same. I started wondering if a little training could go a long way; if a quick lesson on product differentiation, branding and marketing strategy, along with financial planning, could turn this motor oil stand into the next Jiffy Lube.
Nassirou Ouro-Couloum, Kiva Client
6 comments 16 November 2009
“Not Real Men…”
Me and the other Africa-based Kiva Fellows (photo provided by John Briggs)
By Taylor Akin, KF9, Togo
In the months of preparation leading up to my Kiva Fellowship in Lomé, Togo I have had plenty of opportunity to practice my take on the taxicab test – a concise explanation of Kiva’s mission and the work of a Kiva Fellow. Upon completing my training at Kiva Headquarters in San Francisco, I felt confident in my ability to accurately explain Kiva’s approach to microfinance to a relatively neutral audience. More often than not, I encountered the disinterested but common eyes-glazed-over look immediately following the words “non-profit.” To be sure, anyone who has ever gone to the developing world to do anything other than build schools has faced this problem.
While we learned the many ways in which to defend Kiva, there was one area where our taxicab test fell short: defending our host countries. It had not really occurred to me that I would be put in the position of having to justify a five-month trip to the continent of Africa. Yet, I rarely got beyond “I’m going to Togo” before being hit with a surprising amount of ignorance, miseducation, and prejudice.
At first, the most common responses seemed innocent enough. They generally fell along the lines of cautionary warnings like “be careful,” “watch out for the lions,” and “it’s not safe there like it is here.” At other times, comedy was the vessel through which this prejudice was revealed. One co-worker recently asked me when I leave “for the jungle to visit Tarzan” despite my repeated explanations that I’ll be based in a bustling capital city. Finally, there are the truly shocking remarks. About a week ago, a co-worker warned me to “be careful in Africa because the people there are like animals, not real men.”
(more…)
5 comments 13 November 2009
Tuning Out and Coming To…in a Chicken Coop
By Jessica Chervin, KF9 Togo
Yesterday evening, West Africa made me giddy.
I have been in Togo for almost five months, and in West Africa for almost nine. Here, my senses are never neutral. The most lovely moments are tempered by inconvenience. My daily moto rides to and from Microfund are at once thrilling and relaxing, but the soot and smell of burning garbage, the potholes that make Lome’s boulevards feel like urban mogul fields, and the passage by open landfills smack in the middle of the capital, tinge the experience with unpleasantness. Sensory and experiential overload and deprivation are not mutually exclusive. On those moto rides, I am equally attuned to what my heightened senses do not perceive: safety, calm, balance, and the ability to breathe deeply. The expatriate experience in West Africa is one of inescapable contrast. Everything is more colorful, too spicy, impossibly beautiful, unbearably filthy—but never quite normal. If one reacts every time to each of these stimuli, one is quickly exhausted. So, with time, in order to complete the marathon, one has to find a sustainable cruising speed, some semblance of equilibrium in a world that is anything but balanced—or, for that matter, equal.
Tchilabalo in his coop (for the grown hens. The chicks were kept separately across the way).
9 comments 28 October 2009
How I Got Here
Since arriving in Togo last week, a lot of my colleagues at FECECAV have asked how I actually got from Toronto to Kpalimé. Luckily, ten minutes into my trip I pulled out my trusty flip cam, which every Kiva Fellow has been given (thank you Flip!), and started shooting. The following 3-minute video is a condensed version of my trip, the full 16 hours of footage is available upon request.
3 comments 27 October 2009
Kiva Lenders Have Needs, Too
By Abby Gray, KF6 Togo and KF7 Senegal
Jacques, WAGES' Kiva Coordinator, and a colleague taking a boat to visit a Kiva client in a rural area.
Meet Jacques. He’s the Kiva Coordinator at WAGES, a microfinance institution (MFI) based in Togo, West Africa. Every day, a loan officer hand-delivers a stack of borrower information forms and a USB chip full of photos. Jacques has trained the officers how to fill out the forms, use digital cameras, and get borrowers to smile and display their merchandise proudly for pictures.
Jacques formats the pictures, writes the information into paragraphs, and uploads everything to Kiva’s website. Then, during the loan cycle, he reports repayments manually and visits borrowers to collect a progress update and take yet another picture.
The work is inefficient, tedious, and time-consuming.
But it’s worth it. (more…)
9 comments 20 October 2009
Power to the People
By Abby Gray, KF6 Togo and KF7 Senegal
How a Kiva Fellow Alumna’s non-profit organization, SunPower Afrique, is shedding light on MFIs in West Africa
“Beep,” complained my laptop, unhappy about its sudden switch to battery power. The fan above me whirred gently to a stop, no longer drying the beads of sweat incessantly forming on my forehead. “Page can not be displayed,” grumbled Firefox. My internet connection was gone, along with any hope I had of uploading my stack of borrower profiles to the Kiva website.
I walked out into the hallway and found the employees of my Senegalese microfinance institution slowly leaking out of their offices as well. We pulled up chairs in a circle, sat down, and prepared to sweatily twiddle our thumbs until the power gods had mercy on us, whether in ten minutes or ten hours.
An employee at FECECAV, a Togolese MFI, tracking loan repayments by hand. Many of FECECAV's branches operate without electicity.
Power cuts are a regular occurrence in West Africa, as in most parts of the developing world. Production and distribution of electricity are unable to meet demand, causing frequent rolling blackouts and interrupted service. For MFIs (and many other businesses), this means countless manpower hours lost, high overhead costs, low employee morale, a short shelf-life for office equipment and other low efficiencies in daily operations. These consequences are even more debilitating for MFIs who work with Kiva – the Kiva partnership depends on technology and internet connectivity to successfully fund loans for enterprising clients. Gasoline-powered generators, the obvious alternative, represent a significant up-front investment and are extremely costly to run and maintain.
So, what can be done to provide MFIs with a reliable source of power??
Enter Kira Costanza, the courageous Kiva Fellow Alumna, galloping in on her trusty steed named Solar Power!
4 comments 19 August 2009
Microfinance through New-York-Colored Glasses
By Abby Gray, KF6/7, Togo & Senegal (now in New York)
In Dakar, this ad provoked vandals to rebel against the culturally inappropriate image. In New York, it wouldn't get a second glance.
If you have to deal with culture shock after 8 months of living in West Africa, New York is one of the most dramatic places to do it. On one hand, the vibrancy and energy of pedestrian-filled, trafficky New York streets isn’t all that different from the dusty “rues” of Dakar. Colorful fruit carts still grace the sidewalks, and overhearing conversations in foreign languages is a daily occurrence. On the other hand, skyscrapers and giant billboards of half-naked models are everywhere, as are exorbitant price tags on everything from purses to sushi dinners.
Having completed my official Kiva duties, I am now doing research at the Financial Access Initiative (FAI), a microfinance think-tank of sorts. It’s a consortium of researchers from NYU, Harvard, Yale, and Innovations for Poverty Action, focused on expanding access to quality financial services for low-income individuals. (more…)
4 comments 14 July 2009
Signing Off from Senegal
My memories of the last eight months away from home are a jumbled mass of color, freedom, fear, patience, frustration, and energy – raw, shifting memories that have not yet arranged themselves into neat, packageable stories that I can pull from the shelf at parties when I get home.
Watching Obama's Inauguration Speech on the Togolese Roadside
I have tested my sense of self against new backgrounds, ripped away the familiar context of home to hold my idea of “Abby” up to bright new lights. I have sometimes been ashamed of my reactions to new stimuli, and sometimes proud. Catching myself swearing under my breath at street children who asked a little too aggressively for money was not my finest moment; insisting that the Kiva Coordinator not fudge the dates to make loans eligible for Kiva’s website redeemed me.
I have learned about how microfinance operates on a day-to-day basis and about the difficulty of managing work and relationships across distances and cultures. Telling an MFI employee she did not have the IT competency necessary to be the Kiva Coordinator and watching her eyes tear up was my first real introduction to the uncomfortable realities of managing people. These challenges of human nature, of judgment, failure and success, cross all cultural boundaries.
Sunset Behind a Baobab, the National Symbol of Senegal
I have changed in many ways. After struggling for months with my pocket French dictionary, and then, this morning, listening to myself rattle off yet another training in French on sending journal updates to Kiva lenders, I felt like I had tangible proof of how I’ve grown since September. Other ways I’ve grown are less easy to put a finger on, and most will continue to be elusive for many months to come.
10 comments 26 May 2009
Le Colonel
Three years ago, the streets I drive on today in downtown Lomé were ablaze with burning tires and barricades, as civilians protested the contested results of the presidential election. Gnassingbé Eyadéma, the longest ruling leader in Africa (second in the world only to Fidel Castro) had died on February 5, 2005. Two months later, an election pronounced his son, Faure Gnassingbé, the winner, defeating an opposition coalition of six parties.
More than 100 people were wounded in the violence after Faure Gnassingbé was declared the victor of Togo's presidential elections in 2005. (Photo: NYT)
Though the elections were monitored by an outside organization and proclaimed legitimate, some “abnormalities” were cited. According to the New York Times: “In one discrepancy, in the northern prefecture of Kozah, 218,786 people were shown to have voted for Mr. Gnassingbé. Government statistics show the entire population of Kozah as being 156,000.”
A 6-year-old boy killed by stray bullets as the militia raided houses, looking for opposition supporters. (Photo: NYT)
Protesters were shot by the military, innocent bystanders were caught in the crossfire, and nothing ever changed with the election results.
Now, almost four years later, aside from the occasional garbage fire and petty crime, the streets are generally peaceful. The evidence of the period of human rights violations has been reduced to the occasional passing remark, and international sanctions have recently been lifted.
Due to my living situation, however, I personally have a constant, subtle, and morally unsettling reminder of the atrocities.
Before coming to Togo, I met a nice Togolese guy who was volunteering at a soup kitchen with me in New York. We became friends, and when I found out that Kiva was sending me to Togo, he offered to let me stay with his family in Lomé.
I didn’t know that living with his family would make my time in Togo the most rewarding, comfortable and fulfilling travel experience I’ve ever had.
I also didn’t know that his father was the head of the branch of the Togolese military that protects President Gnassingbé.
This is the same President Gnassingbé who is accused of rigging elections, brazenly disrespecting the sanctity of democracy, and commanding a military that allegedly murdered opposition supporters in their own homes in one of the worst human rights violations in modern West African history.
“Le Colonel,” as everyone calls my homestay father, is a strong, serious and often stern man, yet it is clear that the universal respect that the entire household (and neighborhood) has for him goes deeper than his rank. He is strict with his two teenage daughters – they are never allowed to go out, except to go to school or buy something in the neighborhood – but he has explained to me that it is because he wants them to finish their education successfully, without distractions.
His niece, Brenam, lives with us as well. She is 24 (like me), and she has a one-year-old daughter that is the cutest child alive. When she found out she was pregnant two years ago, her father kicked her out of the house. With nowhere to go, she turned to the Colonel, and he took her in. He now pays for Brenam’s continuing education – she is studying finance – for her food and shelter, and for a maid to look after her daughter. Without the Colonel’s generosity, what could Brenam have done as a single mother with no family support? I shudder to think.
It was not easy to decide to write this blog post. With everything the Colonel has done for me, and all the time I have spent in his household, I must admit that I feel an allegiance to him and his family. I love them, and I feel as though I am betraying them in some way by writing this post. However, in the end I have more of an allegiance to the truth, to the dissemination of information and cross-cultural understanding, than to most other things.
I don’t know what the Colonel’s role was in the violence of 2005. Perhaps he was a leading perpetrator, confidently and without hesitation ordering the deaths of innocent people in the same way he orders another bottle of water from the boys who work at the house. But maybe he was a rock that kept the waves of violence from washing away the entire country. Maybe he felt the same compassion for the victims of the clash, the children killed by stray bullets, as he did for his young pregnant niece, and maybe he did his best to protect them amidst extreme political pressure and military commitments.
In the spirit of the American justice system, I ask you all please to reserve judgment on the Colonel. The generosity he has shown me and the way his family has welcomed me as one of their own has allowed me to focus my energy and attention on my work for Kiva, knowing that I have a safe, comfortable place to come home to at night.
I will never know what kind of man the Colonel was in the tragedy of 2005. All I can know for sure is that he loves his daughters enough to be strict with them, he loved Brenam enough to take her in when she had nothing, and he was kind enough to share his home and his family with a helpless American stranger. And for those things he has earned my respect and gratitude.
***
I am a Kiva Fellow, Class of KF6/7, serving three months in Lome, Togo, and three more in Thies, Senegal. Please check out my current MFI, IMCEC, and see all of their fundraising loans here!
4 comments 7 January 2009
The Power of Music: Crossing the Border into Togo
Abozu with Abby and I of "Why I can't give Abozu my Camera" blog fame
I spent the weekend in Lomé, Togo with Abby Gray, another Kiva fellow at WAGES. Wages is basically like Alide in a few years: larger, and with a deeper relationship with Kiva. To get to Togo, I had to cross the border from Benin to Togo alone, which was just a little bit more harrowing and stressful than was necessary between two small, relatively stable countries. I decided to go to Togo on the spur of the moment. Spontaneity: definitely a new quality for me. At 2 pm on Friday I left the office. I should have left at 12:30. In Africa, one should absolutely get to their destination before dark. It is not just convenience, but safety. Abby once crossed the border into Togo from Ghana at night. Chaos ensued at the border after a man was hit by a truck. They put him in the car to drive him to the hospital, then returned almost immediately as he was already dead. There are no traffic laws or lanes: huge trucks, smaller cars and taxis, motos, darting sellers plying their wares, and border crossers all vie for command of the center of the road. The result is anarchical.
There were a few options for crossing the border from Benin to Togo: a bus, a bush taxi, or a private car. Ideally I would know someone with a private car going to Togo that weekend, but as I did not, this left the bus or bush taxi. A taxi seemed safer because there are less people, and buses are known for a high rate of theft.
I found the bush taxis waiting by the Jericho Post office. Right away they tried to charge me over twice the usual price, but I bargained it down. I sat in the car while the brother of the driver stuck his head through the permanently open window and harassed me. None of the men, including the driver, paid any attention. He wouldn’t leave me alone, so I finally got out of the vehicle and contemplated going home completely. Not exactly an auspicious start, but I decided to stick it out. I was sitting in the front seat and the driver asked me if I wanted to “pris 2 places” or pay for two seats. I didn’t want to, until I found out that full capacity in a bush taxi is not 4 passengers, but 7 passengers: 5 in back and 2 in front. I paid for 2 seats (about $8).
There weren’t any other women, and I felt very nervous. The drive was slow and I could feel every bone in my body vibrating with apprehension and a little bit of fear. Was this smart? Getting into a car with five men alone? Near the edge of Cotonou, we picked up another passenger: a woman. I was relieved. There were now 5 in the back, and I could feel the guy behind me stick his elbow into the back of my seat to try to get some traction as we were thrown around on the potholed roads. The heat and dust were intense. I was soaked in sweat from the ride and my face was covered with a thin layer of red dust.
About two hours later we bumped into the actual border. Everyone else got out, and the driver kicked me out of the car because none of the other passengers were going on to Togo. He found me another taxi driver headed to Togo. I appeared to be the only passenger, but he didn’t want me to get out until we got up to the actual border. I suppose he thought I had no idea where I was going (which was true) and also didn’t want to lose a passenger. He kept asking me if I was married (I lied and said yes) and whether or not I would go out with him. Then, he tried to drive through the actual border when he should have let me walk and get passport checked. As soon as he drove through, the patrol became very angry and opened my car door and pulled me out of the car, not roughly, but just forcefully enough that my Beninois cell phone fell out of my hand and I lost it.
The driver accompanied me to passport control. I realized I didn’t know the exact address, just the neighborhood, of the place I was living at in Cotonou, or the area I was going to in Lome. Addresses in Africa are much more fluid. Finally the driver supplied, “Grand Marche?” or big market, which is the main market of Lome. The customs officer wrote it down on the form.
The driver left and I went to see the visa officer. The visa officer did what almost every Beninois man, married or single, does to a foreign girl: relentlessly hits on them. As he asked me pertinent questions, he kept up a constant commentary of impertinent questions – “You don’t know where you’re staying? At my place?” and “I will marry you even if you have two sisters to take care of.” I couldn’t believe the border officer was hitting on me now, wasn’t he supposed to be a law officer? I was so tired and having trouble understanding him. I felt like crying, but realizing it wouldn’t help, I instead looked gamely at him and said, “I have two sisters, and they’re very expensive.”
I walked across the no man’s land, searching for the driver, but couldn’t find him for a good 10 minutes. When I finally found him, he led me to a dirt road behind a few houses. Were we actually going to a car? I was starting to feel a little irrational. Several men followed us, all pointing at me and saying “yavo.” By this time I had just realized my phone was gone, but it was on the other side of the border. Everyone was staring at me. The “flee” instincts in my brain were already engaged, but where to? Not to the visa officer. I told the driver I would pay for two seats.
“But every place is already taken!” he announced, sounding scandalized.
Five men got in the back. The driver, myself, and a younger guy climbed into the front. The car was dead silent, and I could feel the tension radiating up my legs. The guy next to me and I were ignoring each other although we were ear to ear. As the driver downshifted into my left thigh, I wondered if the stupidest thing I had ever done, or the most interesting.
Then the driver put a tape in. The music played in tinny spurts. I could make out English, French, and what was probably Mina. Everyone began to sing along to the reggae tunes, some of it Nigerian English. The music segued into love songs. The men sang along softly in Mina, and a nice breeze came through the window as we sped through southeastern Togo. I began to notice the graceful coconut trees on either side of the road, the actual cleanliness of the environment, a pretty lake. It sort of looked like the Caribbean, and as everyone continued to sing, I began to relax, or as much as I could in my current cramped position. I smiled goofily to myself, laughing at my previous fears. Definitely the most interesting thing I have ever done.
The best moment during my weekend involved another round of music. Abby’s homestay brothers decided to teach Abby and I how to dance Togolese-style. They took Abby’s computer outside. One of the young men began to swirl his arms and jump around like a duck. “The Chinese duck dance!” he trumpeted. They put on Togolese music: hip hop, tribal tunes, reggae. We tried to move like they did. I recognized a song from the taxi ride. We hopped around on one foot, and we taught them the slap-hands game and shadowboxed. We sweated a lot, and finally formed a four-person dance train and jumped up and down the hallway of the outdoor courtyard, singing and panting as we tried to keep up with the beat. The rest of the family stared at us from below as they washed the house and we danced up and down the stairs like a bunch of hooligans. There it was again: the power of music.
Sarah Lawson is a KF6 Kiva Fellow in Cotonou, Benin with the NGO Alide.
One of our dance teachers
2 comments 23 December 2008
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