What’s in a name?
8 September 2008
Well, I’m back in the U.S., which means back to the old grad-student-grind. (There is, however, the new excitement of teaching French 1 for the first time here in Beautiful Berkeley, where I have hardly seen a cloud since my return.) I’ve had a few things to finish up for my Kiva fellowship in Senegal, though, since my last week in the field was spent… in the field. We ran around trying to pack as many interviews as we could into the last few days; but, as if to mock our efforts at productivity, fate struck me with a quick bout of travel-related discomfort that prevented us from visiting our ecovillage clients at Palmerin, where coincidentally there was supposed to be a giant beachside party that week.
Looking back at all the pictures, notes, and data that I now have to make sense of, names and places that three months ago sounded hopelessly foreign resonate with meaning — and return to my memory tinged with nostalgia. “Assane Gueye” is no longer just “ecovillage president, member ISTD group, preschool, Thiaroye-sur-mer” but a hilarious friend and colleague who keeps a smile on his face and the jokes rolling out — the art of teasing, called tooñ or taquinerie, is highly developed among all Senegalese friends and greatly contributes to the fun had by foreigners such as myself — in spite of the fact that his group’s Kiva-financed preschool for underprivileged children is on the brink of closing. Their landlord of three years kicked them out so he could do construction on the building; but the school’s problems had been wearing it down well before that, since many parents cannot afford the $6 per month that the school asks in order to function. The fate of the project is precarious, yet Assane’s cheer and optimism remain steadfast. As he spent his holiday walking through the rain and mud with us (while gently mocking me the whole way) to visit Kiva’s other projects in Thiaroye, a suburb of Dakar that is perpetually jammed with traffic since it straddles the one highway that leads out of town, each client we saw thanked him for his tireless work managing their loans — a volunteer job. But, unlike other persons of community importance who I’ve met throughout Senegal, you would never know from meeting him that he is so respected. Young, unassuming, and witty, his presence reminds you that when your efforts don’t work out, pressing on is not just doable, but doable while enjoying life too.
Assane at the Thiaroye ecovillage office
Or, I could cite the long lists of names which the president of the Ndiaye Ndiaye ecovillage, located several hours southeast of Dakar in the town of Fatick, asked us to diligently record each time we met a group there out of concern for the precise accuracy of our records. Names like Wanguène Sène, Dieynaba Niane, the two Yadikone Ndiaye’s, and Ndiass Diouf (whose group has the unusual activity of making furnaces fueled by cow manure as an alternative to expensive butane stoves) fill this part of my notepad. But such tongue-twisters can be anything but meaningless when I look at them now. One of these groups, which mercifully for me happens to have the simple French name of “Trois Cocotiers,” gave me a heck of a welcome! The women hadn’t all arrived when we first went to their leader’s house to meet them; we waited for a while, but since it appeared they would be taking their time, we left to meet other groups. When we returned an hour or two later, everyone was assembled. But to make up for their tardiness, the women jumped out of their seats one by one and proceeded to dance for a good 15 minutes.
They even sent someone to go fetch the drums to add some atmosphere.
This spectacle more than made up for the beach party I missed in Palmerin.
It is astounding to me to think of how rich my memories of Senegal, a country I knew only through books and the Bissap Baobab restaurant in San Francisco before, have become: foggy ideas and empty names have taken on sharp contours and been colored in with both joy and worry. What will happen to ISTD’s school, or more importantly, its kids?
My only regret is that summers are so short. I can’t wait to go back.
Happiness
9 July 2008
I am beginning to think that Senegal is the land of happiness. Not only do young people often use this English word — along with “nice,” “fine,” and “cool” — to express that everything is OK (in reference to a popular comedian), but my Wolof teacher, Fatou, has informed me that the national language has no easy way of saying “I’m frustrated,” or even for that matter “I’m sad.” Or “what a pity.” Should I attribute this to the complexity of a language that also happens to have no adjectives, or have I really landed in a country that knows no sadness? To say the least, the situation is inconvenient for someone who is frustrated as often as I am — for me Africa is a fascinating, if not always an easy, place to live. As for Fatou, who also teaches French, she claims she didn’t even know the word frustré until she started working with Americans.
Full of smiles: When we do interviews in the villages we take pics of the kids first so they will let us photograph the adults in peace
To put it less frivolously, I am impressed not only by the linguistic acrobatics that the Wolof language imposes on my brain, but by the determination of many of the Kiva borrowers that I’ve met during my first month here. Sem, my MFI, is a little different from others in that it functions something like the microfinance wing of a separate organization, namely the Senegalese branch of the Global Ecovillage Network. (That is, we refer to Sem as being affiliated with Gen-Sen.) Gen-Sen has a whole set of ideals and goals that go beyond microfinance, including revitalizing traditional values, emphasizing community and spirituality, and protecting the environment. It is comprised of a network of ecovillages, or communities of people throughout Senegal who strive to live in a sustainable way and to engage local communities with sustainable living strategies. Each ecovillage selects, trains, and tracks business groups to be financed by Sem, often through Kiva funds, which means that Sem’s office in Dakar only has a very few employees; much of the on-site work is done by committees of volunteers. Once a group is selected to have its project financed, its participants are considered members of the ecovillage and are expected to live and work in accordance with Gen-Sen’s mission.
For some reason I’ve been surprised to find that these ideals are more than just words. Maybe it’s because the Senegalese news, at least on the state-owned channel RTS, runs story after story about conferences, seminars, master classes, meetings, think sessions, and workshops about development. It all sounds good — even euphoric — but I have a feeling that this choice of content is meant to reinforce Senegal’s national myth of being the “best” country in West Africa, that is, the country that enjoys more stability, greater freedoms, and a higher quality of life than its neighbors. Personally, I would rather like to know why the electricity is always going out in some neighborhoods of Dakar but not in others, and why that is accepted as a fact of life here. When I express this to Fatou in my broken Wolof, she charges, with her typical level-headedness and a touch of irony, that Senegal is a place for talking, not doing.
But that judgment might be a bit harsh. I’ve seen plenty of “doing” lately, for the most part far from the TV spotlight. Many of the people I’ve interviewed don’t tell me about their desire to make a profit or improve their quality of life, but about their determination to benefit the whole local community. At Diourbel, several groups said so explicitly. They feel that if they can implant the example of successful small businesses and jobs in the community’s mind that they might stand a chance of slowing the exodus of young people to the big city. The president of the ecovillage there, Ibrahima Faye, always seems to be bursting at the seams with ideas and advice about how to provide better support for the Kiva borrowers as their businesses progress. He has popularized the plan of holding off on all profit for the first few years and reinvesting it back into the business to make sure that the business is solid on its feet. This seems like a tough deal to me — since it means lots of work and no pay, borrowers who do this must live by other means on the side in the meantime. But the hard work is paying off: many groups say that they either are expanding or hope to expand their operations into other West African countries. Ibrahima, himself a member of a Kiva-financed group, is working to open a second shop in Bamako, the capital of Mali which is an arduous 2-day bus trip away, in a few weeks.
Another Kiva group from Diourbel, called Propaf, was awarded 3rd prize from the President of Senegal for women’s entrepreneurship in May. Its members, who refine and process grain to be resold, also spoke of extending their reach outward into the “subregion,” as people say. More importantly though, they said they would have continued their daily work processing grain even without a prize, even if the profits remained small. As it is, they never had any hope of being rewarded in such a prestigious manner.
Holding the presidential prize
From another angle, a group of women in Popenguine is so committed to the environment that they allow their profitable activities (an educational camp, selling grains and baby mango trees) to revolve around their original volunteer activity, promoting reforestation. They regularly plant trees in their own area and try to inspire others to care about the environment as well.
These humble successes do not mean that profit isn’t important — after all, the first goal of microfinance is to empower people to lift themselves out of poverty. For all the positive stories, peanut farmers in Louly are struggling to even survive given last year’s poor harvest and this year’s already late rainy season. But they maintain hope and are determined to pay back their loans on time; and plans are under way to supplement their traditional profession with more diverse activities like raising livestock.
It looks like Senegal may not be the land of happiness, after all. Like any country, it’s a place of competing discourses and tough realities. Amid power and water shortages, the whims of Mother Nature, and the TV’s insistence that everything is just dandy, people are facing the difficulties of entrenched poverty with courage and generosity. Perhaps, then, I should have the courage to see the inability to say “I’m frustrated” as a learning experience?
Meet CAURIE Microfinance in Senegal!
18 June 2008
By Mary Moseley
Senegal Fellow
CAURIE MF, Caisse Autonome pour le Renforcement des initiatives Economiques par la Microfinance, is a mid-size microfinance institution that serves over 15,000 clients in Senegal and as of March 31st 2008, has a loan portfolio just over $4mUSD. They are present in several regions of the country: Diourbel, Kolda, Louga, Thiès, and Ziguinchor. Their mission is to offer best practice micro-finance services to poor, female-owned micro-enterprises in primarily rural areas while investing in their own eventual financial autonomy.
CAURIE is the organizational offspring of the Catholic Relief Services (CRS) and its primary regional partner, Caritas Internationalis. After a decade of Microcredit activities in Senegal, CRS realized that as an NGO, it would not be able to operate effectively within the realms of Credit and Savings, nor would it meet the needs of the country’s growing Microfinance market. Caritas-Thiès and CRS-Senegal then joined forces to launch a Microfinance project utilizing their program experience and after 5 successful years, decided to officially establish CAURIE Microfinance in September 2005.
A monthly meeting at one of the Village banks established by Caurie.
As a Kiva Fellow in Senegal, I’ve therefore gotten a chance to learn a lot about CAURIE and would like to introduce them to you! Read on to learn a little more about this amazing organization.
I’ve been working and living at the CAURIE Headquarters since March 2008. The director, Mamadou Lamine Gueye, has all the makings of an amazing leader: hardworking, responsive, decisive, and a nice guy to boot. Mr. Gueye has Fatoumata Binta Daniff, an ex-loan officer and accountant, spearheading the Kiva loan processing from headquarters. Mrs. Daniff is incredibly hardworking and creates each loan profile with precision and care. I think that Kiva has partnered with CAURIE at a really interesting time. CAURIE is an emerging microfinance company - it is growing rapidly. The inclusion of Kiva into its loan funding process is sure to foster their planned growth as an organization.
It’s important to note that amidst massive growth and expansion, CAURIE’s Village Bank lending methodology remains faithful to the core concepts of microfinance and, in my opinion, succeeds because of it. CAURIE lends to groups of women who form village-banking groups. Once the women organize themselves, CAURIE provides microfinance training (savings and loan methodology), improving a woman’s chance of success from day one. CAURIE has over 275 Village Banks (VBs) in Senegal with between 35 and 60 women in each. VB’s can get started in a variety of ways. CAURIE will sometimes send representatives out to villages to offer their services. Other times, groups of women approach CAURIE asking to set up a bank in their village. To begin, several informational meetings are held between CAURIE staff, the village leaders and the future borrowers. Within each Village Bank, the women split up into Solidarity Groups of between 3 and 10 women. In lieu of putting up collateral for loans, they agree to be held responsible for their fellow solidarity group members’ loans. Solidarity Groups are one of the reasons CAURIE’s loan default rate is 0% to date.
Caurie staff, Mary & clients during a monthly meeting at one of the Village banks
CAURIE’s loans are usually for a duration of 6 months and repaid by one single bulk payment at the end of the cycle. Although payments are made at the end of each loan term, the Village Banks meet monthly. During the meeting, each woman is called up to present her deposit into her savings account. Loan payments are also made in front of the group. At each monthly meeting, the members can opt to take out small loans from their Village Bank’s savings account. These monthly loans are very small and not related to the larger loans that CAURIE and Kiva lenders fund. But, small amounts like $20 US can be helpful in these women’s lives, and at each monthly meeting many of them choose to borrow a small sum to be repaid in full the following month.
Caurie staff visiting a client of a Village bank.
All women are welcome into the program and allowed a first loan of up to approximately $60 USD for a 6-month loan term. After the first loan, each borrower’s credit limit is evaluated and re-calculated based on her repayment history, their savings account balances and their experience with loans. With each 6-month cycle, the women have an opportunity to build their credit and take a larger loan or remain at whichever borrowing level is comfortable for them. I’ve met with many of CAURIE’s borrowers and loan officers. I’ve attended several monthly meetings and met with the elected management committee at each bank. The management committees are elected by the VB and are VB members themselves. All of these have been incredibly positive experiences, without exception. I believe in CAURIE’s methodology and I highly respect the hard work of the staff and the dedication of their borrowers.
Both CAURIE and the Microfinance sector in general in Senegal are growing rapidly. To date, there are over 600 microfinance institutions in the country. The beauty of Microfinance in Senegal is that it reaches out to typically under-served rural areas as opposed to traditional banking, which is primarily focused in urban areas. CAURIE is growing its loan portfolio, opening more Village Banks, and will be expanding its services to include micro-insurance this summer!
*This blog was posted on behalf of Mary Moseley*
Bonjour from Senegal!
12 April 2008
Although we are not too active on the blog, there are a few of us Fellows here in west Africa, one of Kiva’s fastest growing partnership regions! I’m currently based in Senegal with CAURIE Microfinance.
For my first Kiva Fellows blog, I’d like to introduce you to a few of CAURIE’s clients: local entrepreneurs Awa Yombe Diagné and Mboudy Démé. I’ve had the pleasure of following their new loans on the Kiva site and meeting with them personally. While the economic and financial implications of microfinance and its impact on poverty throughout the world are incredibly interesting, equally interesting are the micro borrowers and their stories. Please read on to find out more about these Senegalese businesswomen!
AWA YOMBE DIAGNÉ: FUTURE REGIONAL TRADER
Awa lives in a village in the Thiès region of Senegal. She has been a customer of CAURIE Microfinance for several years and uses their micro-loans to stock and replenish her boutique. Awa is an ambitious business owner with a keen sense of marketing and customer service. Her boutique sells beauty products and household items and is the only one of its kind in the village. She provides a very important service by traveling to the capitol city, Dakar, and bringing back good that can only be found there. During holidays and various seasons of the year she stocks the store with goods that she knows her customers will need for parties and traveling. If a client requests something specific, she listens and brings in the requested items.
Recently, Awa began renovations on her store! Instead of pausing business during construction, Awa took her merchandise out of the store and went door to door around her village to sell the inventory.
Awa wants to eventually become a regional trader in West Africa. She hopes to travel to cities such as Dubai to import products for distribution in Senegal. To do so, she plans to become trained in management and marketing and to continue using micro-credit to reinforce and grow her business.
MBOUDY DÉMÉ: ANIMAL SALES STRATEGIST
Mboudy Démé has been in the business of buying and reselling goats and chickens with her husband for six years. They live in a very rural village near Ngollar, Senegal where water and electricity can be scarce. Mboudy has been a customer of CAURIE Microfinance for five years and has used their micro-loans for her business. She has implemented various strategies to mitigate the effects that climate and disease have on her business. During the driest season, there is not enough grass for her animals to eat and they become too emaciated to sell. So she uses her loans to purchase food and feeders to fatten them up. Through micro-loans, She has also ensured consistent and high quality vaccinations for the animals. Her animals survived a recent epidemic because of the vaccinations.
In the future, Mboudy and her husband hope to borrow a large loan to build a fenced-in area near her house to protect the animals from predators and thieves. During our interview, Mboudy kept reinforcing that there is a huge difference in the quality of her life since becoming a microfinance borrower. While she cannot make it rain or ensure regular electricity in her village, she can make improvements to her life on a smaller scale. With the expanded profits from the animal sales, she has recently purchased a water pump for her well, a television, and more nutritious food for her children.
