Stepping Out "Into the Field"

I recently returned to Dar after ten amazing days in Dodoma and Morogoro.  The purpose of the trip was for me to get a feel for what the reality is in the field for KickStart's sales team, for the distributors and dealers that sell KickStart's MoneyMaker irrigation pumps, and for the farmers who use (or want to use) the pumps.  Now, understand that I was not going into this experience blind: I've read about KickStart for years, talked to Alfred and other members of the KickStart team about the challenges they face, and have many friends who've related their experiences serving in the Peace Corps in developing countries.  Still, nothing compares to getting out there seeing things for yourself and there's a certain level of understanding I've realized you just can't have without that firsthand experience.

I was fortunate to have Tino (KickStart's driver) drop me off at the station in Dar to make sure I got on the right bus and nobody tried to scam me.  Even so, as soon as he was gone, a man came up outside the bus window with a clipboard and tried to convince me that I needed to pay him a $4 "foreigner fee" in addition to the ticket I had already bought (I refused).  The 5-hour drive turned out to be longer and more cramped than I expected, but I was fortunate to sit next to a student returning to university in Dodoma who spoke good English and told me about his dreams to someday move to the United States and work in Nashville or Michigan as a radio host.  No, he didn't like country music and yes, he understood how cold Michigan gets; he read about them on the internet and decided that they looked like nice places and wouldn't be as expensive as big cities.

I was met in Dodoma by Deus, KickStart's Regional Sales Officer (RSO) for that territory.  Deus is a tall, charming man with a big smile and easy nature — quite the natural salesperson.  At first, Deus didn't seem to believe me that my accommodations were more than satisfactory, that I was happy to eat wherever and whatever he preferred, and that I didn't expect him to alter his schedule on my behalf.  Over my four days in Dodoma, I accompanied Deus and the local sales rep, James, to meetings with four dealers in the city (including Innocencia, who was KickStart's first dealer in Tanzania), drove out to some villages to build awareness, and handed out hundreds of fliers at a market day.

The market day was easily the most memorable experience of that section of the trip.  To get there, we had to drive about two hours out of the city (and "city" is already stretching it: Dodoma's population is less than 325,000), down very-bumpy-verging-on-nonexistent dirt roads, until we reached an open area where a couple thousand people had congregated, some with tents or makeshift structures to hawk their goods, many with a bundle or nothing at all.  When we rolled up in our shiny, 4-door Toyota pickup truck with MoneyMaker logos on the side, we easily had the nicest vehicle in the market.  Deus and James set up demonstration pumps, and half a dozen children rushed over with buckets of water on their heads to fill our larger demonstration buckets.  Unfortunately, the PA system was in the shop for repairs, so Deus and James weren't able to attract quite as big a crowd as they normally would, but having the only muzungu in the market passing out flyers certainly helped draw some extra attention.  It was a strange sensation to have dozens of eyes following my every move.  What struck me most was that despite the obvious affluence of myself and my colleagues relative to almost everybody else at the market, nobody asked us for food or money, just information on the MoneyMaker pumps (and, in a few cases, our shirts and hats with the MoneyMaker logo).  Not quite the "walking ATM" treatment I'd come to expect from my experiences as a tourist in Southeast Asia and India, and it was a pleasant surprise.

The day after the market, Deus drove me halfway to Morogoro, a beautiful region surrounded by luscious green mountains, and transferred me to Frank, another one of KickStart's Regional Sales Officers.  Although Frank was perfectly polite, he didn't immediately exude the same warmth as Deus, and I sensed that he was not entirely pleased to have me with him.  Over the next day, as we got to know each other and Frank, like Deus, realized that I was eager to learn and didn't require special accommodations, he became much more welcoming and talkative.  After a meeting with the executive officers in Mlali (a village an hour from Morogoro), Frank told me how please he was with the reception they gave us and that he was sure that my presence caused them to pay more attention than they would have if he had been alone.  "When they see a muzungu, they expect that good things will happen," he said.  Although I found the attitudes behind his observation problematic, I was glad my presence had helped in some way.

As we drove back to Morogoro, Frank commented that now I had seen what real poverty is like, and that it was far worse than the poverty I may have seen in the cities.  I told him he was right, but that the poverty I had just seen wasn't the image most Americans have of African poverty.  For us, the image of African poverty is a shirtless child with a distended belly or a woman in front of a refugee tent, begging for a handout.  This image of African poverty has been hammered home by disaster-fueled media coverage and heart-string-pulling television commercials urging us to commit some small daily amount to feed a child in Africa.  The African poverty I saw was hard-working farmers who were exposed to a tool that they knew could help them create a better life for themselves and their families, but had neither the $73-$123 they needed to purchase that tool, nor any way to access a loan which they would surely be able to repay in full within a matter of months.  These farmers were poor, but not looking for handouts.  They lacked the resources to improve their situation, but not knowledge of what they needed or the will to apply it.  Conversations about foreign aid and development work would be very different if this were the image of African poverty that more people carried in their minds.

I knew before my trip that lack of access to credit was possibly the largest barrier to many more farmers purchasing and using MoneyMaker pumps.  Frank knew this too, and we heard requests for loans from every group of farmers and village leaders we encountered.  Arriving back in Morogoro, we passed an office for FINCA, one of the world's oldest and largest microfinance institutions with over $300 million in assets.  I suggested to Frank that we stop in and see what products they might have for the farmers in Mlali and other nearby villages.  An hour later, we knew that FINCA was not the answer to the farmers' needs for the following reasons:

1) FINCA only makes loans to business owners, not farmers

2) FINCA only makes loans to women, not men

3) FINCA requires that borrowers make payments every two weeks, beginning immediately after receiving their loans (based on a 2-3 month planting cycles, farmers would have to make payments almost equal to the principal before they could would be able to earn any income from their harvest)

The FINCA manager was sympathetic to what we were trying to do, but said her hands were tied and gave us the contact information for the country director in Dar es Salaam in case we wanted to follow up with him.  By that evening, I was so fired up about the poverty reduction potential of microfinance coupled with MoneyMaker pumps, that I was contemplating finding a way to stay in Morogoro and launch a pilot program after I finished up my volunteer projects with KickStart.  How could the solution be so clear, yet none of the existing actors be willing to step into that role?

The next day, in another village meeting, someone mentioned PRIDE, another microfinance institution that they thought might have potential.  One of the women in the room, who we'd also talked to the previous day, knew the location of their Morogoro office and gave us directions.  Soon after arriving at PRIDE's office, Frank and I found ourselves in a meeting with the branch's general manager, financial officer, and operations manager.  They informed us that PRIDE targets small-scale farmers and offers loan terms based on crop cycles, with the initial payment only due after two or three months.  There was a little miscommunication where they thought we were asking them to loan money directly to KickStart or alter their applicant screening criteria, but once we established that our idea of "collaboration" was to simply start by having KickStart's RSOs inform PRIDE's loan officers when they went to villages and generated demand for loans and then the loan officers could go there and form lending groups according to PRIDE's standard criteria, they became very excited about the potential of such a partnership.  This being Tanzania, however, their debilitating deference to authority prevented them from agreeing to take any immediate action, and instead they gave us the contact information for PRIDE's executive director in Arusha and told us to get in contact with him.  Nevertheless, Frank and I left the office elated, and when we shared the good news with Alfred, he told us that he had reached out to someone at PRIDE via email earlier in the week and was glad that we had been able to make a positive connection for him to build on.  [Note: On Monday, I received an email from Frank telling me that at the market day on Sunday, he learned that the PRIDE folks we had spoken with ended up reaching out to some of the village leaders in Mlali, so it appears that they ended up taking initiative after all!]

That night over dinner, talk eventually turned to politics, with Frank expressing his admiration for Obama and pleasure that Americans elected him as our president.  For my part, I explained that I also thought very highly of Obama, but that he only won the election with a relatively small majority of the vote, and so cautioned against assuming that Americans as a group had changed that much since electing Bush.  Frank's next question caused me to cringe: "Why are the black people in America so violent?"  Despite two and a half years in college leading discussions on race-related issues, I struggled to come up with an acceptable response.  I tried explaining first that most black people in the US aren't violent, but that the higher level of violence can be explained in party by the lack of economic opportunities in many black communities, coupled with lingering institutional racism and the unconscious racism that still lingers (despite Obama's election), and made worse by certain self-perpetuating cycles of destruction related to the drug trade.  It was clear that neither Frank nor I were really satisfied with my answer, but I was relieved when he nodded and let it go.

On my final day in the field, Frank and I drove out to Kilosa and Kisanga with Yusuf, KickStart's new distributor in the region, to introduce him to the dealers in those towns.  On the return trip, Frank took us on a route through Mikumi National Park.  It started to pour by the time we got about halfway through the park, but before then I was able to snap a few photos of deer, zebras, elephants, buffalo, and even one giraffe off in the distance.  You can find those photos and others I took during my trip at http://www.flickr.com/photos/delitzer/sets/72157623360055327/ (I think there's something stuck on an inner lens of my camera, hence the dark blur on some of the images).  My favorite shot is included at right.

After that taste of Tanzania beyond Dar es Salaam, I'm eager to get out of the city and go exploring as much as possible on my remaining weekends.  Tanzania is an absolutely gorgeous country and I look forward to experiencing as much of it as possible!

One final note: for those of you who haven't already heard through Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, or Gchat, I'm now blogging on the nonprofit sector and issues relating to poverty and social change at Full Contact Philanthropy.  I'll be writing new posts about once per week and the first one about the shortcomings of traditional philanthropy is already up, so go check it out!