The Widow's Mite

I asked several groups to rank in the order of importance to them the three components of a typical village-based savings and loan program: savings, credit and something called the "social fund." I was surprised to hear that, in each instance, the participants cited the social fund as being the single most important aspect of the program.

This was not intuitive for me: we had begun researching these types of groups as a way of eliminating some of the barriers to micro-enterprise development created by microcredit lenders and other organizations. I had thought that credit would be the most important, followed by savings (but even then, that savings only existed to provide sufficient capital for the credit program), and then the social fund a distant last.

The social fund (we might call it a benevolent fund) is not only a small self-insurance fund, but a way to build social cohesion within the group and community by allowing members to respond quickly to emergencies.

"The social fund is most important to us," one woman explained simply, "because through it we can help one another."

Here's how the fund works:

Every week when the group comes together to deposit savings, each member is required first to make a small deposit into the "social fund." The group decides how much is appropriate, but 1 metical per week (about $0.04) was typical. This social fund grows slowly, increasing by perhaps $1 a week.

If someone isn't able to scrape together the required contribution, they could simply make a double contribution the following week.

The social fund adds a degree of complexity to the program that I wasn't sure was warranted by its meager benefits. To be honest, I thought that the idea was a little silly. Meeting after meeting, the women and men who participated in these groups chipped away at my erroneous assumption. Had it not been for their overwhelming enthusiasm, I would have suggested scrapping the peripheral program as a needless distraction.

I dared ask a question that would never occur to me at home in Canada, but seemed obvious from my then-vantage point sitting on a caniço mat under a shelter built with mortar excreted from termites and a leaky thatch roof: is it difficult to save one metical per week?

The tone of the lady's voice who responded suggested that her answer was obvious: yes, of course it is. "But," she continued, "contributing to the social fund is a habit. I put aside enough money every week, just like I do for food."

The group collectively decides when to draw on the fund. All of the women I spoke with lit up when they recounted their ability to purchase medication for a neighbour's sick child, or to make simple funeral preparations for a deceased spouse, or respond to other unexpected events.

These families, living in rural southern Africa, are so poor that they could not otherwise afford a trip to a hospital room that would save the life of a child, even if that trip costs under $1.

These groups are community-based, not church-based, and many members are not Christians. Some are Muslim, others hold traditional beliefs. Regardless of their beliefs, the members of the group demonstrated over and over again what it would look like to have God's kingdom realized here on Earth.

Yes, every week through these groups, God's Kingdom is made real in rural Africa by women and men who can scarcely afford to eat, yet can spare an extra mite to help a neighbour in need. Every one of them makes their deposit hoping that they can help a neighbour, but knowing that it could very well be their own family that requires emergency aid this week.

Grassroots Banking

While in Nampula, Mario, Samuel and I met up with 10 groups of men and women, perhaps 200 people, who all expressed to us the benefit that has been brought to their lives through something called village-based savings and loan programs. These were 200 of the 27,000 people involved in such groups throughout Mozambique, and over half a million around the world.

There is no need to reinvent the wheel when such a proven methodology can be borrowed and implemented in our own communities of influence.

We wanted to travel to Nampula to observe some of these groups first-hand, to evaluate for ourselves whether or not they are having an impact on the lives of their members. And person after person, story after story, confirmed that the benefit is real.

The foundational component of the village-based savings and loan program is organizing community members into independent groups of 15 - 30 people for the purpose of saving money. The savings aren't big: many people are able to put aside $0.20 each week, if anything at all; others have saved as much as $6 after a good week at the market, but that's rare. One group, with 22 members, saved a little under $4 this week: on average, $0.17 each.

Each group's members collect the savings and store them in a wooden box. Keys for the box's two locks are kept with two trustworthy group members, ensuring that the box is opened only in front of the group.

Some people question the security of the box. Couldn't it be stolen and opened easily enough with an axe or a rock? The group takes certain precautions, such as selecting a group member to store the box who has a secure house (which means a front door that locks). The reality, though, is that assets are not secure in any place or any form in rural Africa. To underline that point, the leader of one of the groups we met with was absent: his goats had been stolen the night before, and he was off pursuing the thief.

We also asked about the necessity of the pooled savings concept. After all, couldn't each person keep their own savings in their own homes? Time and again, the women told us about the dangers of keeping money in their homes: before joining these groups, savings were always consumed by myriad little purchases at the market, or by neighbours who begged to borrow it, or by husbands who washed it down their throats at the local filling station. The box, they said, injected discipline into their savings that was difficult to achieve otherwise.

A second important element of the methodology is that group members can request loans from the accumulated capital, subject to approval from fellow group members. The terms are strict: often 30-day loans at 10% interest per month, but the group sets these terms themselves. Interest generated from loans is returned to the box as well, to be distributed to deposit-holders at the end of the year. Because the group sets its own rates, and because no money leaves the group (as it does for commercial and microcredit banks), group members reported being satisfied with this lending option.

"We like being able to borrow from the box," one woman explained to me. "We no longer have any external dependencies."

Better still, because the group is on the hook for the loan if it is unrecoverable, the group frequently comes together to help a neighbour with a struggling business in order to improve the likelihood that the borrower will not default. This is personal banking at its finest.

Each group exists for cycles of one year at a time. At the end of the year, outstanding loans are repaid and savings are returned to deposit-holders with any interest accumulated from loans taken out over the year. Each member keeps a record of her savings, so she can know precisely how much money she has stored in the box at any given time. Despite these records, the annual distribution always proves shocking. One woman knew that she would receive $40 at the end of last year, but was still in disbelief when distribution day came around. She had never held so much money at one time in her life. She described to us how she went home and carefully hid the money, and over the following days would open her hiding place, take out the $40 and just hold it in her hand and gaze at it before returning it to safety.

Members could put their accumulated savings back into the box at the beginning of the following cycle, but I didn't meet anyone who had ever done that. Everybody has a place to invest their annual nest egg: school tuition for their children, a clay oven to start a bakery business, a field to grow vegetables, a bicycle to improve access to markets, pigs for reproduction.

One man, who lived under a leaky thatched roof, vowed that if he could ever save enough money to buy tin sheets to improve his house, he would sleep the first night on top of the new roof as a sign of thankfulness. When we spoke with him, he had recently completed his dreamed-about home improvements, and was nursing a cold that he caught sleeping in the rain on top of his house.

Story after story, people told us how their lives have improved as a result of being in these groups. That several of the groups were on their fourth yearly cycle is a testament that they believe there is real value in belonging to the group. These well-established groups, who have been through several cycles of saving and investing, were most positive.

One young group explained to us that they had recently started after having seen the success of a neighbouring group. They had previously stayed on the sidelines as skeptics, until jealousy over the investments that the original group was able to make convinced them to form their own.

Of course, none of this means that the methodology is a panacea. Facilitating community members to mobilize into village-based savings and loan programs makes a valuable contribution towards fighting poverty, but is not a solution all by itself. It's not perfect, but we didn't meet anyone who wanted to quit their involvement in their groups, either.

Break the Rules!

In an effort to avoid erecting barriers to the success of our program, I wrote that we would avoid doing things that Mario and Samuel cannot replicate on their own when I'm gone. That was last week.

This week, Glenn and I broke the rules in a big, exciting way. I brought Mario and Samuel to Nampula, a province in northern Mozambique, to show them a village-based savings and loan project being administered completely by Mozambicans.

Our desire in doing so was to demonstrate our commitment to the program by investing in them as its coordinators, to create momentum to kick off their new jobs, and most importantly, to inspire them to see what Mozambicans can accomplish on their own. Through the trip, Glenn and I wanted to help them to cast a vision for themselves of what they could accomplish back home in Maputo.

And we had some fun along the way, as well.

Nampula is Samuel's birthplace, but he left when he was 6, in the midst of civil war, and hasn't been back since. He could understand a few words of Makua, the local tribal language, but not many. Mario had never been on an airplane before, though used to spend a lot of time at the airport with his father, before he passed away, watching flights coming in and going out.

Once in Nampula, we rented a four-by-four, and quickly realized the wisdom of our decision. Many of the roads that we drove on were hazardous on the best of days, but we didn't have the luxury of those "best" days. It rained every afternoon of our trip, and the roads became slippery, muddy paths carved out of the wilderness.

At one point, as we drove down a slippery incline, we squeezed our way past a bus stranded in the ditch to our left, and a pickup similarly ensconced to our right. The hole that we drove through was so tight that the driver of the misfortuned pickup had to roll down his window and fold in his side mirror for us to pass.

We were informed that there is no such thing as a street map for the city of Nampula, the capital city, so there was no hope of a map to guide us from one village to the next. "As long as you've got a car, you've got accommodation," were the wise words of one of my colleagues back in Maputo. He thought he was kidding at the time, and so did I, until we tried driving from the district of Ribaue back to Nampula, and somehow ended up in Mecuburi instead. I had noticed only one possible turn in our four-hour journey, and by the time we realized we were lost, that one turn was was an hour or two in the muddy darkness behind us, so we pulled off the road into someone's field and camped for the night.

For their hospitality we offered them a tree limb full of bananas -- perhaps a hundred of them -- that we were given the previous day and couldn't possibly have eaten all by ourselves.

(That night, I thought I stepped on a thorn -- my foot stung like I had stepped on something sharp. Little did I know, a jigger flea had taken up residence in the bottom of my foot, making a nest and laying a bunch of eggs. As the doctor cut a small hole in my foot and cleaned them out, he showed us pictures of the painful sores that often inflict barefooted children that come into his office with similar, but much more severe, infestations.)

We spent hours and hours in that rented car, kept from weariness by the sight of dozens of people walking, from sunrise to sunset, along the same muddy paths pulling their loads by bicycle or atop their heads to the market like yoked oxen. Seeing their daily plight, our chore paled.

And, in one- or two-hour snippets of time between nearly 900km of mostly treacherous driving, we witnessed the value that village-based savings and loan programs are providing to tens of thousands of rural Africans.

We broke the rules in a big way this past week, and I hope that it was a valuable investment. On Monday morning, we'll try to restore the discipline of no cars, no computers, no certificates. And no airplanes or rental cars, either.

Set Up For Success

Great news. We have hired Samuel and Mario as two micro-enterprise development coordinators (and, for those who are interested, they agreed to work for a salary of $100 per month). Now the real challenge begins: equipping these two men who have demonstrated a passion and willingness to help their fellow Mozambicans to develop and implement a successful program.

Glenn and I both leave in a little under four months, and we can't help but hear a loud ticking sound in our ears as the time grows closer and closer.

One of the things that we're particularly mindful of is to start out with these new coordinators firmly holding the torch of responsibility for this new program. For the next four months, we'll walk alongside them to help and encourage, but the torch is in their hands.

The torch analogy is borrowed from a mentor who once described evangelism and development projects this way: he said that his experience has shown him that good programs often fail as the foreign creators of the program attempt to pass the torch to national leadership. The torch, he cautioned, is often dropped in the transfer.

Great programs avoid this pitfall by starting out with the torch firmly in the hands of nationals who can provide consistent, local leadership to the program. The nationals own the vision for the program from the outset.

Great words, but what do they mean in practice? That's our present challenge.

Barriers to success -- the weak points where leaders stumble and risk dropping the torch -- come in all shapes and sizes. We're working hard to identify and avoid as many as possible.

When we leave, these coordinators will be required to carry out the program without the benefit of our cars, so for the next four months, Glenn and I will avoid shuttling them around in our cars. Walking or taking local transit will be less efficient, but will prevent creating a barrier to continuity that would need to be torn down later.

If the coordinators need to send an email, they will use an Internet cafe.

If they need to make a presentation, they will do so using materials and resources available to them, not our laptops and projectors.

Past programs have failed to transition to national leadership for the simplest of reasons. I've had it explained to me, for example, that a Mozambican couldn't continue a training program that a missionary had previously started because that missionary had handed out certificates at its completion (something that we had done earlier, as well). The program needed certificates in order to be legitimate, the Mozambican reasoned, but he didn't have the means of making any.

Certificates may be nice, but that's a lousy reason to not continue a program. Certificates, unless they can be produced locally, are a barrier to sustainability that we need not create.

Reflecting on sustainability in August, I wrote that I would act "only where absolutely necessary as an up-front leader." Almost half a year later, I haven't found any situation in which it has been absolutely necessary for me to lead by standing in front of a group. The only reason I have found to do so is for my own sense of usefulness (which, by the way, is not a good enough reason to lead from the front).

This is exactly the point that I was coming to realize in December: I realized that I, too, was a potential barrier, and that I needed to get out of the way, focusing on "supporting, encouraging and equipping people like Mario to sell the strategy to his nation's own sons and daughters."

If something can't be done when I'm gone, it shouldn't be done now. No cars, no computers, no certificates. No white guy, except as an encourager, equipper and mentor. That will, I hope, facilitate the continuity of our program when I'm gone.

If we can start out with as few barriers to sustainability as possible, the Mozambicans who continue the program after our departure will have few to dismantle or surmount.

The Incredible Shrinking Globe

Maputo used to be 13,700km from our home in Mississauga. Now, it seems, it is just another suburb.

How do I know this? Laura telephoned her grandmother. Granddaughter using a laptop, Internet connection and Skype software; grandmother using a standard old telephone plugged into her wall and serviced by Ma Bell, just like it has been for decades. Laura's grandmother couldn't quite understand how she seemed so close. "When your grandfather went off to war," she said, "I wasn't able to talk to him for four years." Needless to say, both were happy for this new world.

The short commute between Mississauga and Maputo provides an important lesson about poverty, as well. I learned this lesson when my friend Mario stopped in at our house today. You know, two-dollar-a-day Mario. No electricity or running water Mario. No roof over his head Mario.

I offer him something to eat every time he comes, and on occasion, when he's really hungry, he accepts. He'll always accept a glass of water, but preferably not straight out of the fridge.

Today, Mario wanted to ask me for a favour. No problem, I thought. What kind of favour would he ask, I wondered. Probably a loan, I thought.

"Could I please use your computer to check my Gmail account?" Wow, I thought. Gmail in Africa.

And while he was checking his Gmail account, I helped him read a piece of junk mail that he received. "Could it really be true that I've won $500,000 and a new Toyota car?" he asked me. We were both in awe; he, because he saw a sliver of possibility that riches had been heaped on this poor man by some unknown source. Me, because this poor man receives electronic junk mail despite not having electricity in his home.

Wow. Even Africa's poor receive spam.

I argued earlier that poverty is the antonym of power; that the solution to poverty isn't wealth, but empowerment. First, clean drinking water, some bread, maybe even some basic medicines, and then empowerment. A sense of controlling one's own destiny.

Technology has empowered two-dollar-a-day Mario with global knowledge. New tools built on top of a platform of technology mean that I have been able to have intelligent conversation with an undereducated, impoverished African about weapons of mass destruction, the retirement of Kofi Annan and the value of the UN in global diplomacy, and the death penalty in places like California and Florida.

It sounds strange, but traveling to Africa felt like coming to a new world, not unlike the Portuguese explorers who colonized Mozambique. Now that I've been here for half a year, I've realized that the globe has shrunk a lot in the last half-millennium.

It has shrunk so much that Mario, who is my neighbour now, will continue to be once I've moved back to Canada, as well. Maputo has become a suburb of Mississauga.

The Price of the Church

A knock came at our door this morning from Samuel, one of the men to whom Glenn and I offered a job as a coordinator of our micro-enterprise development program. He stopped by to discuss some of the position's details.

Salary, it turns out, is a sticking point.

Some Mozambicans have an expression for jobs that don't pay very well. They pay the price of the banana. Bananas are cheap and so, I presume, are those employers.

There's a lesser-known expression, too. The price of the church. Apparently in the grand hierarchy of employment, the church is even cheaper than the banana.

It's that way for good reason. People are supposed to work for the church not for the promise of riches, but because they have a passion for the work. They accept such jobs because they feel a calling from God and willingly accept the sacrifice.

Sure, my conscience says, but that can't become an excuse for the church to abuse its employees, especially when the purpose of our program is to develop Mozambicans' economic well-being to ensure that hunger and illness are distant memories.

Besides, we want to allow them sufficient time and motivation to operate their own micro-enterprises, like Samuel's barber shop, so that they are received as credible, knowledgeable micro-enterprise trainers. We also don't want to cut them off from all other economic activity, knowing that this year's salary is backed by a promise, and next year's is backed by a hope. Nothing, until we have sufficient money in the bank, can be backed by a guarantee.

So what is a fair salary in a third-world country? We are offering a salary of 2,500 meticais -- or a little under $100 -- a month which is, apparently, the price of the church.

I don't have access to a proper salary survey to benchmark against, but I do know what some others are paying. I have only enough information to know that we're offering neither the highest nor the lowest of salaries.

And we're offering a high enough salary that nobody ever quotes it in the context of defining the poor. Extreme poverty is usually defined to be those people who earn something less than $1 per day. Half of the world, the same sources usually quote, live on less than $2 per day.

At $100 a month -- $3.29 a day -- our salary is, according to Samuel, higher than what entry-level government jobs are paying in Maputo. And, to be clear, Samuel wasn't arguing for a ten-fold increase, but a ten- or twenty-percent increase, not unlike anyone at home trying to squeeze out a slightly higher salary.

I have no illusions that this salary is anyone's idea of a get-rich-quick scheme, but it's not going to leave anyone in Africa hungry or homeless, either.

Of course, I don't mean to suggest that I approached the conversation in cavalier fashion. What moral footing do I have to argue that with the man sitting across the table from me in my $650/month apartment? Looking through my lens, I have made a huge sacrifice to live in Mozambique. To him, I am still a king, albeit perhaps one who relinquished a crown jewel or two. How can I look Samuel in the eye and argue that $100 a month is a good salary?

I've just closed the door behind my guest, and am feeling emotionally spent. I'm feeling a little bruised and beaten, not because Samuel was even remotely abusive or impolite. The bruises have been inflicted by my own conscience, battling the merits of offering a salary the size of which, I admitted to Samuel, would leave me starving to death.

A Day at the Beach

It may be the bleak mid-winter back home, but not in Africa. On Saturday, our colleagues invited us to the beach at Marracuene. What a great way to see a bit more of Mozambique and relax at the same time. Mozambique hugs the coast of the Indian Ocean, and is reputed to have great beaches.

Of course, since Maputo is a port city, it's right on the ocean but the locals tell us that the beaches are better a bit out of the city.

Foreigners have advised us to get even further out of the city.

As it turns out, getting to the Marracuene beach is no picnic.

First, there was the ferry, they said. When we arrived at the docks, someone pointed to the ferry. I laughed, not for a second taking her seriously. That's clearly a raft, and a sketchy one at that. Before I had a chance to ask when the ferry would arrive, the man on the little raft waived our truck on board.

Our truck barely fit, with our wheels hanging over the edge, but that seemed to concern only two passengers: Laura and myself.

I couldn't help but think that they would probably keep shuttling cars across the channel until the day the ferry sunk. And wondered when the last time the safety inspector had come to visit. They do have safety inspectors, right?

After the short ferry ride, we had to drive along a road for about 45 minutes. Again, "road" was a poor choice of words. Between dodging small craters and herds of cattle, we likely would have been better off driving in the fields beside the road. Which, at some particularly rough points, our colleague, Nate, actually did.

Then we got to the sandy stretch, which reminded me of the morning after an all-night snow storm in Canada, before the snowploughs had had a chance to clear the streets.

We eventually arrived in-tact, and the beach was magnificent. Given the journey, it shouldn't have come as a big surprise that the beach was empty. We had it all to ourselves. Just us and our colleagues. And those little crabs playing in the surf, allowing themselves to get swept up in the warm salty water and riding it down again, like they were at an amusement park.

Many people tend to think of Africa as a poor, dry, starving continent. Even a war-torn continent. But it's also a lovely continent, with much natural beauty to boast.

Olga's Frayed Nerves

I was reflecting this week on a question that I asked in a posting back in July. Before setting foot in Mozambique, I wondered what remnants I would find of a protracted civil war that has certainly, I thought, left some emotional and physical scars on this country and its people.

This week, I heard a story involving Olga, whose wedding we were at in the fall, that reveals an interesting example of the frayed nerves with which some people still struggle.

Last Sunday, Olga was injured and briefly hospitalized in what she believed was the resumption of the country's once-protracted and bloody civil war, which ended with a ceasefire in 1992.

She wasn't wounded by fighting; instead, her injuries were sustained as she jumped out of the window of the minibus taxi that she was riding in when she heard the eruption of explosions and gunfire. Fearing for her life, she desperately wanted to flee.

As it turns out, she need not have been alarmed. The country is still at peace, but ringing in her ears were the haunting noises of the civil war era: for 45 minutes on Sunday afternoon, obsolete mortar shells and other military equipment exploded in a fire apparently started by the heat of the African summer.

The scars of battle are deep. And for some people, like Olga, fear simmers just below the surface.

What is Poverty?

Thinking about coming back to Canada, people have asked us how we can possibly integrate our new experiences of poverty with what we see back home. Can we have compassion for Canada's poor, many of whom benefit from a comparatively buoyant social safety net? Or should we all focus our attention overseas?

My dad asked the question most directly: "We seem so disconnected in Canada that we can't relate to the poor. I guess looking at us from where you are, there are no POOR in Canada."

My dad's comment was in reaction to our observation of poorest-of-the-poor.

Dad's right. There are few people in Canada who have so little in life that they are forced to find survival in the trash cast off by the world's poor. And yet, there are countless people in Canada who have less than nothing; whose debts outweigh their assets. Countless people who owe more than they have.

Even the men in Maputo's dumpsters owe the world little, if only because the world trusts them with little.

But what does this say about poverty? What is poverty, if it cannot be calculated by an objective balancing of a personal ledger?

Perhaps one answer is that poverty is a lack of power; the solution, then, becomes giving the impoverished a sense of controlling her own destiny.

Money, after all, is nothing but a proxy for power.

Is a man without bread to eat, who lacks the power to control his own diet, considered poor? Most people would agree that he is.

What about the child forced to work in the squalid conditions of a sewing sweatshop until her fingers are numb, lacking the power to play with a ball in the courtyard; lacking the power to be a child? Again, little disagreement.

Or a young adult without a sufficient education, who lacks the power to land a steady job?

What about the immigrant who, having arrived in North America, realizes that his credentials aren't recognized and is forced to drive a taxi in order to pay the rent? Sure, he keeps his family above water, but just barely.

Any development program, any intervention, any desire or action to help the poor should first be processed through this sieve: how is what I am proposing going to empower the poor? Will they be able to continue helping themselves long after I am gone, or once the attention of the development community has been diverted to the next crisis?

Staring poverty in the eye in Mozambique, I wrestle often to understand which position is more enviable: being a generally happy person with few economic resources, or a wealthy person who feels enslaved by circumstances and expectations?

One of the most refreshing and surprising truths about Mozambique is that many of the people here, who would fit squarely within most traditional definitions of poverty, are content. Life is not perfect for these people, but they're happy. They are in control of their lives, wear clean clothes and are relatively healthy.

There are countless others who are extremely poor: who do not have enough to eat, or cannot afford medications when they are ill, or cannot afford to clothe their children in the uniforms that the school officials require. But perhaps these people are not facing such dire circumstances simply because they lack material wealth, but rather because they lack the ability to control their own destinies.

Those who are desperately poor may need help stepping onto the first rung of the development ladder, but this hand up must be given in a way that preserves or bolsters their sense of self-control and empowerment. To give someone material wealth but rob them of their self-worth is no gift at all. We will always feel poor, whether in Africa or America, as long as we believe that we are trapped by our circumstances, however real or imagined.