MICROFINANCE TRIP JOURNAL

In May 2009, several Unitus supporters traveled to Africa to experience microfinance firsthand and join in the celebration of our East Africa office launch. The group visited Jamii Bora Trust, a Nairobi-based Unitus partner, and Yehu Microfinance, based outside Mombasa. Suzanne Skees, trip participant and microfinance supporter, shares her experiences below.

> Read Jonah's microfinance trip journal (Suzanne's youngest son)

Suzanne's Trip Journal

1. The City
2. The Journey Here
3. Jamii Bora
4. A Jamii Bora Client
5. The Slums
6. Unitus Office Celebration
7. Yehu Microfinance
8. Leaving Africa
9. The Journey Home

The City

Sitting in Gate 3 Café at the Nairobi airport, sipping on a Coke Light, I type feverishly on a borrowed laptop, trying to record all we’ve seen. A group of us have flown here from the U.S., coast-to-coast from Seattle to New York. Nearly all of us have never before set foot on African soil.  Around me people chatter in a medley of languages, flying to and from this sophisticated metropolis of 4 million people.

But that is not the Kenya we have seen: no museums, no city tours, no shows.  Since we landed last Saturday—after  a couple of ease-in excursions into national preserves to pet baby elephants and feed rescued giraffes—we loaded onto hot, bumpity busses to visit people who exist in an entirely different world.

The families we saw, deep in the Nairobi slums, may never flush a toilet or take a shower, much less fly in an airplane.  Generations grow up, give birth, and die—often, we are told, from AIDS and alcoholism—and so it continues with their children, never emerging from this one condensed section of the city.

The Journey Here

It’s taken me decades to get here to Africa.  My early years were preoccupied with the privileges that opportunity affords—education and work, home and family—it was becoming a mother that opened my eyes to microfinance. My big-eyed first baby Benjamin, and later Isaac and Jonah who soon followed, would grow up in our quaint town south of San Francisco having shelter and immunizations, clean water and nutritious food, textbooks and computers. So why shouldn’t all babies have such opportunity?

As they got older I shifted from my work as a writer and mother into increasingly more and more work with nonprofits. My friendship with Unitus had begun a few years prior to this trip. At a dinner in San Jose, I heard co-founder Mike Murray and staff member Jayme Hommer speak plainly about their ambitions to completely eradicate poverty with microloans for millions of the working poor. Since then, I’d tracked the skyrocket-growth of Unitus and its 24 partners reaching 8 million micro-entrepreneurs around the planet.

And so by the time the baby who initially inspired me to donate to microfinance turned 17, I was finally on a plane to Africa to visit several of Unitus’s partner MFIs and see if it had made any difference.

Jamii Bora

One of Unitus’s superstar MFI partners is Jamii Bora Trust, founded in Kenya by Ingrid Munro in 1999, supported by Unitus since 2004.  Over the last 10 years, they’ve reached 230,000 members and made a name for themselves as a “depth player,” says Natalie Barndt, Interim East Africa Director for Unitus, who works with Jamii Bora on the ground in Kenya.  Rather than measuring growth merely in terms of numbers served, Jamii Bora named itself “good family” in Kiswahili and prides itself on caring for each borrower as a family member, with home loans and health insurance, alcohol rehabilitation and peer outreach.  Every single office employee has come up the ranks from poverty via microloans, and later, during our tour of the “other” Africa, I would see firsthand the life they’d left.

We begin our visit with Jamii Bora at their headquarters in Nairobi, a clean two-story building with their green logo painted on the front wall.  The air hangs heavy and humid.  Staff create a circle with us outside and clap along to lilting songs in Kiswahili about their “jamii bora.”  These tunes will replay in our heads like an incessant merry-go-round the rest of the week.

Walking through the downstairs loan center, we meet the branch manager Nancy, who tells us that they can take any person’s nightmare and turn it into a dream come true.  She shows us the electronic I.D. cards and biometric system that track loans and payments down to the penny, and we watch a man proceed from check-in to the roped line that looks identical to my own bank, and make a payment in cash to the teller behind the window.

“You are most welcome,” everyone tells us as we watch, listen and absorb their work. Upstairs in a conference room, we meet a white-haired woman they all call “Mama Ingrid” Munro. She sits with us for hours, meandering through her story of fifty “stubborn beggars,” destitute women who nagged Munro until she agreed to help them launch a small credit circle. Munro had labored long years in affordable housing in Africa and thought she would retire and write a book about the illogic of development—i.e., the fact that charity doesn’t work.

“You can’t lift anybody out of poverty,” she touches both hands to the table-clothed folding table for emphasis, “no matter how kind or well-intentioned you are.  It doesn’t work. They have to climb up for themselves."

 Ingrid Munro

“You can give people support, but do not give them [handouts].  It is human nature:  If you give, they think this is the way it should be, and they only become more clever about how to beg.”

Life had other plans for Munro, who now tells her husband, “I don’t have time to be tired.  I will work until I die; we are meant to help one another as much as we can.”

The week we arrive, her MFI celebrates their most recent loan to a 68-year-old woman which put their loan base over the $3 billion kS mark. In one decade, Jamii Bora has not only financially backed nearly a quarter of a million borrowers, they’ve “built a safety net around them” of life, disaster, and health insurance—even for

Schoolboys at Kaputei

HIV-positive clients, which is rarely done. They combine peer-to-peer business counseling with lekuva, an AA program tailored to fit their members’ families. They have already launched Africa’s first affordable green housing community, Kaputei, and plan to build more towns while extending their reach into the countryside.

Working with Kenyan and American universities, they intend to expand their business education program into an accredited graduate school:  “The University of Street Begging,” laughs Munro, “to teach how do you go from being a street beggar to being in big business.  No MBA program in the world can teach you that.”

A Jamii Bora Client

Joyce used to beg to feed her five children. Given a chance to work, she began by digging and planting four acres by hand to grow maize, beans, yams, and onions. She took in laundry, began saving shillings, and gradually acquired a series of loans to build seven now-thriving businesses.

“There is another Bill Gates coming,” laughs Munro, “and she is a woman from Africa. Joyce is now a millionaire.”

Hands dancing in parallel as she recounts her own tale, Joyce stands tall and smiles wide in a silk-like suit of soft-floral celadon with white t-shirt and headwrap.  When she was starving, her neighbors helped as they could, she recalls; but the woman who helped most was her friend who brought her to microfinance. She had to save a certain amount before qualifying for a loan—as do all members—so she took in laundry to supplement her tenant farming.

It took Joyce 1 ½ years to qualify for her first large loan of about $100USD, and then she held a meeting with her children to discuss “what to do with the money.”  Together they decided to launch a restaurant, and began with just two tables and four chairs, serving tea and chapatti. 

“Then from there, I didn’t stop!” she repeats throughout her story. When she needed livestock for her food businesses, she invested in poultry. When the local utilities kept blinking off during every rainstorm, she purchased a generator for back-up so as not to lose precious productivity. Two years ago, when someone left a charcoal cooker smoldering overnight and her building burned to the ground, Joyce collapsed in discouragement—and then picked herself up and rebuilt a new restaurant with storage facilities and an adjacent, fireproof stone kitchen.

Today Joyce manages two restaurants, caters lunch for five schools, and makes payments on a $1.2 million/kS loan.

The Slums

“This is poverty,” warns Kate Cochran, Unitus VP of External Relations, “more palpable, deeper, and somehow more stark than anyplace else on the planet.”

Nairobi has a population of about 4 million, half of whom live in slums. We walk through two of them: Mathare Valley—as opposite as possible from a valley—and Kibera, at one million residents the second-largest slum in Africa. 

Only because of the network of thugs-turned-guards who accompany us do we even dare enter the slums. These men surround us front and back as we wind our way through narrow paths in a maze of shacks and mud.

In zigzag rows stand huts made of corrugated steel, bolted together loosely with dirt floors, front doors draped with fabric and interior walls lined with plastic sheeting. One bare light-bulb dangles overhead. There is no water except what one purchases and carries in, and the toilets are narrow muddy paths winding through the slums.  As we step over sewage and the occasional trash pile or passed-out drunk, we take in the combined smells of cooking meat-fat and human excrement.  Smoke surrounds us, and I choke, wanting  fresh air; there is none here.

This poverty feels deeper than anywhere else because of this:  One cannot move. In 8’ x 10’ to 10’ x 10’ huts housing six to ten people each, with everyone hearing your business, men clustered around fires, women hanging in doorways, babies wandering aimlessly, all inches away from you.  And one cannot breathe in this equatorial heat with no trees or grass, no blue to the sky, just steel and smoke and smog and noise.

Unitus Office Celebration

Just after our time in the Nairobi slums, we join with some of the local staff from Kenya and Tanzania to celebrate the launch of the Unitus East Africa Microfinance Growth Centre. This center will offer MFI executives training in strategy and leadership in eighteen-month programs beginning Summer 2009.

Over fifty of us trade in our crusty khakis for business suits and meander into the ballroom of a very elegant British colonial style hotel, sipping champagne while serenaded by African folk singers.  We begin with inspiration from Joseph Grenny, Unitus Board Chair and co-founder:

“Margaret Mead once said, ‘Never doubt that a small group of people can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

We proceed to hear summaries of programs from President Ed Bland and Unitus Partners Winnie Terry of Tujijenge and Adet Kachi of Yehu Microfinance. Then we take a quick flight to the south-coast city of Mombasa, and tuck in for the night underneath protection of Deet-spray and bed-nets. We have entered the high-risk malaria zone.

Yehu Microfinance

The next morning, our bus lumbers away from the hotel just as daylight breaks to visit the headquarters of the newest Unitus MFI partner, Yehu (means “our” in Swahili) Microfinance. We peer eagerly out the windows to see where it is that we had landed last night in the dark, on this fast-moving tour.

Buildings get a front-façade painting in colors far brighter than the gray of the city; the very earth has changed, from the blood-red clay at the foot of Mt. Kenya, to a caramel-tan silt on its way to the sandy shores south of town. However, we drive away from the sea, over a bridge (for Mombasa actually sits on an island) and into gently rolling hills that stretch out into savannah.

Launched in 2000, Yehu Microfinance acquired an ambitious CEO in 2006 who invigorated their rural outreach sufficiently to attract Unitus partnership. Their group aims to reach far into the outlying areas in Kenya, where 76 percent of the country’s population lives on less than $2/day.

Yehu’s headquarter office, we are told, is too tiny to hold us, so we wait in buses to travel to a microfinance meeting. Though we left at 6am, we don’t arrive until 10:30am. “After all,” people say without a sigh, “this is Africa,” and that explains everything here, from no wireless internet to endless traffic jams to half-paced, double-time days.

We arrive at a Yehu credit-circle meeting in a wide-open plain, under the circle of shade of an ancient live oak tree.  A cluster of beginners, men on one side and women on the other—they normally do not mix—have already heard their regional manager’s lesson in this last of an 8-week pre-loan course.  They’ve studied business skills and record keeping, done the requisite 500-shillings group savings, and applied for loans.

Here in the country, everything gets recorded on paper ledgers, with data and loan payments hand-carried to the main office once a week. Yehu plans to implement a computerized MIS system with the help of Unitus and then expand their current base of 7,000 members to several hundred thousand in the next few years.

We sit on handmade benches and bent-twig chairs carried in on the heads of MFI members from nearby churches and schools. Some folks have walked 1 ½ hours to attend the meeting, but if they want their loans, they must show up.  Some members sell “meat goat” to butchers, others manage retail or resale shops.

Next we walk through roadside stands of Yehu clients.  One of the most successful women, together with her brother, runs a cell-phone recharging shop in which she can juice about 30 variant phones at once. Another sells colorful bolts of fabrics for women’s sarongs and little-girl dresses for school uniforms; she works with her sister and trains young girls on a series of old Singers against the side wall.  A man and his wife operate a stand selling charcoal and groceries, and someone in our group buys a few bags of roasted peanuts to nibble as we walk.

Here, the poverty seems less bleak.  We look up and there is open blue sky above; below, trash only in designated piles or firepits.  There is space between the houses, and there is a school building with a wind-banging roof where other women’s credit circles gather to make loan payments and chat.  In the country, there is no need for armed guards; and while these families may earn less, children are playing outside and adults all appear engaged in industry.  Even though I do not see the same depth of melancholy here as in the slums, I do not really trust my own eyes, for I am only a passerby. 

Leaving Africa

Driving back to Mombasa the next morning, I end up in the one jeep that has no Unitus staff. We joke that now we volunteers and donors may speak freely. We talk about how we cannot fathom the daily lives of either the MFI members or the NGO staff who serve them, toiling six to seven days a week, long after we spent our few days in the field.

We all shared the feeling that despite the "show" inevitably put on for the sake of financial backers in any venture, there is an authenticity to purpose here. And that microfinance can begin to effect necessary change in uplifting the poor. It is not enough. We have seen some of the millions swallowed up by the circumstances into which they happened to be born. We have heard the stories of heroism of what it takes for one person to lift themselves into a different existence, and we have glimpsed the backbreaking work of Unitus's partners to help human beings one at a time, over a lifetime of hours, with courage no one really measures in worth.

The Journey Home

Poverty inconveniences us. It stares us in the eye unblinking, flies swirling around its stench. We want to look away and not know, therefore not to feel responsible.  Poverty is so big, and so old, and we are only one person.

Being here is like being caught inside one of those late-night television commercials that beg you to sponsor a child.  The big-eyed, beautiful children who reach up and take your hand and will not let go; the mothers with babies in slings standing wearily in doorways; the skinny men in dusty work-shirts waiting in vain to sell a few shillings’ worth of coal: All the scenes we had viewed as surreal from the comfort of our American armchairs had come true here in Africa over the last few days.

When I drag myself home to the San Francisco Bay Area, two days and three flights later, my head explodes with an aching cold, and I just feel sad.  Two beloved family members have had surgery while I was away, and one dear brother was diagnosed with cancer. Among my own teenage children, current challenges include a life-threatening illness and law-breaking defiance.  Unpaid bills and undone work pile up on my desk, and suddenly my own tiny privileged life looks insurmountable.

I write to my brother in Kentucky as he begins treatment for cancer, and all I can think of to comfort him is to tell him about Jane Ngoiri - a Jamii Bora client I met. She has outlived betrayal, murder, homelessness, prostitution, and HIV, I tell him, and she would say to you that “the greater your difficulties, the more your heart will grow.” As I tell my brother the story of Jane, I realize that this courageous woman has left an indelible imprint on me.

What I can do is to speak of Jane and Joyce and others until someone listens. I can dare to look at their struggles and know there is nothing fair about the disparity between my microcosm and theirs. And if I seek to know the people of our partners at Unitus, it is I who may come away stronger, less selfish, less comfortable with my comfort zone.  It is I who must now get to work.

Suzanne Skees
Unitus Microfinance Trip Participant
May 2009

Photos courtesy of Michael Bridan, Joseph Grenny and Unitus staff