The Limits of our Generosity

Every day, we witness so many people in great need. Africa has justly earned its billing as the Earth's poor continent. We struggle with what the appropriate response might be: how can we help? How should we help?

Not a day goes by without several people asking for money. Sometimes it's people knocking on our car window at a traffic light. Often it's people trying to be productive by asking if they can guard our car, or wash it.

Yesterday, a man who noticed that I was a regular at the language school called out to me in English, "Boss, tomorrow you wash my car?" (I'm pretty sure he meant the other way around, but maybe I should bring my rag and bucket today just to be sure.) I replied, "Of course."

One man who recently washed our car did so with the same rag and bucket that he'd been using for days. When he was done, the car looked like he had smeared around the existing dirt and added a little of his own for good measure.

We get our car washed often.

There are so many people looking for help. Many people aren't lazy; there aren't many jobs to be found, and the country is struggling to catch up on educating a population frozen in time by civil war.

At home, we often found ourselves screening people before giving them money. If you're asking for my money, you had better look like you're going to spend it on food, not alcohol.

As Westerners, we often prefer to give anonymously through large charitable organizations that will make sure that our contributions are being put to good use. Doing so also gets us an accounting of our year's generosity and a tax receipt so that we can get some of it back.

The Bible challenges us to give without judgment. It challenges us to give to anyone who asks, without evaluating whether or not their need surpasses an arbitrary threshold that we have established in our minds. It challenges us to give, even if the asker may not use our gift in a way that we would consider to be appropriate:

"Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you." (Matthew 5:42)

That sounds a little bit off-culture, doesn't it? Our culture teaches us that, being the possessors of our wealth, we have the right to make the final determination about who needs our benevolence and who doesn't.

African culture flips this on its head. The person requesting something plays a major role in determining whether his or her need is greater than that of the potential donor. If someone is asking me for money in Africa, it's not only because they have a great need for it, but also because they've concluded that my money would do greater good to them than it would to me.

And almost without exception, they're right. Here, the poverty is so gripping. When we walk our trash out to the dumpster, there are always a couple of men who quietly take our bags from us. They've sorted through the dumpster and taken anything of value: any rotten fruit or moldy bread that may have been discarded. They'll look through our bags, too, before they place them in the dumpster.

Imagine having to live off of the refuse of the world's poorest.

Nobody deserves to live that kind of life. We've decided to bring along some extra fruit or bread whenever we take out our garbage. These men have yet to thank us for it, but we don't do it for our own reward.

If I have one less dollar, or one less loaf of bread, or one less banana, it has very little impact on my life. If the average Mozambican had one more of any of these, it would mean that she could feed her children today. Economists call this marginal benefit.

We're still struggling with how we can help, but for now we've decided that African culture and Christianity are in agreement on this point: if someone asks us for something, let's give it.

And Christianity would suggest that we should do so back home in Canada, too.

Thanksgiving for Two

Yesterday was Thanksgiving Day in Canada. Most of our Canadian friends and family are probably eating left-over turkey sandwiches at work today (it's true -- you are, aren't you?).

Being in Mozambique and knowing no other Canadians celebrating this holiday, we feasted by ourselves, and had a wonderful time.

The Canadian government formalized Thanksgiving as a holiday in 1957, naming the second Monday of October a public holiday, "for general thanksgiving to Almighty God for the blessings with which the people of Canada have been favoured."

Previously, the holiday had been celebrated for numerous reasons: the end of combat, the end of cholera, the restoration of health and, most commonly, a bountiful harvest.

(This past week, on October 4, Mozambique had a public holiday in recognition of the 14th anniversary of the end of their civil war. Peace is still fragile, though many Mozambicans are tired of war, both in their own country and around the world.)

Despite being half a world away from Canada, this was a Thanksgiving Day for which we had many reasons to be thankful. We are in need of very little in life. Arguably nothing.

As if to emphasize the point, the electricity went out in the midst of cooking our meal. Knowing that many people in Mozambique don't have electricity, and those who do see it as a bit of a luxury, we weren't sure what pressure the electrical utility faces to restore the power when it's out. Children played in the streets, oblivious to any problem. (Thankfully, our dinner continued to cook on our butane stove.)

Once the power was restored, our Internet was spotty, though in the end we were able to talk to family and friends.

We feasted on a chicken so small that it would have been a stretch to feed a family of four with Thanksgiving-sized portions. Laura spiced her helping with piri-piri, just to make Canadian Thanksgiving a little more Mozambican.

The chicken was stuffed with dressing. Delicious dressing.

We also had pumpkin pie, though made with butternut squash, since in Mozambique pumpkins are things only read about in used children's books donated through relief agencies. Laura's first attempt at making a pie crust from scratch was a big success. (My attempt at whipped cream, using "boxed cream" that needs no refrigeration and has a shelf life measured in months, was less successful.)

We had plenty of delicious food. Laura even brought a left-over chicken sandwich to work for lunch today.

I don't know why we have so much when others so close to us are hungry, but for our lot in life, we can be thankful. And for that of our neighbours, we can work towards equality.

One (Tentative) Step for Microcredit

Love him or hate him, Rudy Giuliani (in his autobiography, Leadership) advises against announcing new projects until they have been successfully implemented and results have been proven. As mayor of New York City, his practice was to underpromise and overdeliver, increasing the electorate's pleasure with his results.

For the sake of chronicling our journey of thought and activity, I'm going to break Mr. Giuliani's rules of leadership. I'm going to tell you what we're planning on doing. Your part of the bargain is to not hold it against me if this plan doesn't work out exactly as described.

In an earlier lamentation, I expressed some frustration about the limitations of the microcredit industry in Mozambique. Specifically, I worried about the helpfulness of an industry that charges the world's poorest entrepreneurs interest rates on their loans of 6% per month, and that makes credit accessible only to those with an existing business. New entrepreneurs, no matter how well thought-out a business plan they have crafted, need not apply.

Our team recently visited a small chicken farm that has spawned the development of a strategy for tackling one of these two limitations: allowing budding entrepreneurs without business experience to access existing microcredit channels.

Our vision is to facilitate the creation of "out-grower co-operatives," leveraging the expertise of a successful entrepreneur to assist budding new entrepreneurs to start their own businesses -- in this case, chicken farms.

Think of it as franchised chicken farming.

We will match groups of people interested in starting a new business (the franchisees) with an existing, successful chicken farmer (the franchisor) to start a new farm. The successful entrepreneur will benefit by sharing in any profits of the out-grower co-operative; the new entrepreneurs will benefit by having access to the expertise of the successful entrepreneur, which will help them to establish and maintain successful farms and, importantly, allow them to obtain start-up capital based on the creditworthiness of the successful entrepreneur.

A side (but not insignificant) benefit is that it will bring more meat into protein-starved diets.

The out-grower co-operative strategy is based on another noteworthy leadership principle written about by leadership academicians and practitioners alike: build good ideas around great people.

We are proposing to create chicken farms not because chicken farms alone will pull Mozambique from the mire, but because the "key people" we have identified for the pilot phase are successful chicken farmers. Had they been coconut growers, or garment makers, or fishermen, the model would be the same: built around the expertise of the key people identified.

Once the new chicken farmers have several cycles of business experience under their figurative belts, they may choose to continue operating the chicken farming co-operative, or may choose to leverage their newly-established business experience to start an enterprise of their own choosing and design.

We are hoping to be able to test the model this fall, but still have many details to work out. We also have a lot of people to convince on the merits of the model before we can implement it -- not least of which is the micro-credit community.

And, of course, the next challenge will be to find a way of reducing the cost of credit in a manner that will out-last my tenure in Mozambique.

Further Reading:

• Out-Grower Co-operative Strategy - English (PDF)
  
• Out-Grower Co-operative Strategy - Portuguese (PDF)
  
• Financial Tables (PDF)