TIA

I’m settling in at my new home in Kampala, and it is just interesting to hear what different things people have to say about Africa’s future. I’m reading a book by Muhammad Yunus, hearing stories from the people I am staying with, and talking to different Ugandans, and a lot of messages are mixed. The main point I’ve fully come to see here is that charity is not the answer. At least, not pure charitable giving. The big feeling this week has been in seeing firsthand how widespread Africa’s problems really are; it is genuinely hard to always feel optimistic about it.

The corruption runs rampant here, from the president down to the traffic cops, and it causes many Ugandans to not trust each other, or businesses, or the banks – and sometimes for good reason. But how can distrust be the foundation of any stable structure? Some of the cultural norms also seem to pose some of the most enormous hurdles to future progress. People still sacrifice infants here! As the saying goes, any man who kills a baby will be rich. It doesn’t happen nearly as often as it used to, but it’s not just happening out in the rural areas still, it happens every week in Kampala. And the other sad thing, many more Ugandans believe that this myth is true, even though they would never actually act on it. There is a lot of misinformation here, and it is just so hard to make people believe research. You may often see a mother give her children sugar cane to chew on – it gives them strong teeth!…or cavities. But to them it seems different than sugar, and their traditional medicine says that it is good for their teeth. They also still put oil on burns. Trying to change cultural beliefs is surprisingly difficult. Eradicating the culture of corruption would be such a good starting place, but people just accept it, and worse, take part as soon as they are given enough power.

The infrastructure here is also terrible. The roads have huge potholes, and there are gaping holes in the sidewalks every couple feet. Some may be two, three, even ten feet deep. Imagine walking at night! There are limited or no sidewalks in many areas, and the traffic is such a complete disaster. On average five motorbike drivers die a day in Kampala alone! After watching the way they weave in and out of traffic and the way the rest of the cars drive, I believe it. It sort of feels like how I picture the world with no government or organization. Sadly, they do have a government, just not a very good one. There are also way too many people driving cars for the capacity of the roads, and there is not current hope that the roads will be widened or improved. The British actually put in a lot of the infrastructure and early buildings, and it’s hard not to notice the deterioration that has come from the British leaving. For better or worse, there were a few things the British did here that were definitely good things.

Fortunately, in all this chaos, the one book I brought with me is providing a little ray of hope.  Muhammad Yunus founded the Grameen Bank (a huge microcredit program in Bangaladesh), but this particular book Creating a World Without Poverty focuses on many of the business subsidiaries of Grameen, which really do work in all different things. His format for raising people out of poverty seems to hold water even in light of many of the problems that government, business, and non-profit attempts have faced in the past. He believes in the concept of social business, and I think he is right.

I’ve always felt compelled about the potential of business to help do go, but I thought the best efforts were probably in things like Corporate Social Responsibility and microfinance operations. However, a social business can really be in anything, so long as the bottom line is to relieve poverty or provide a social good, while remaining sustainable. The most interesting example, to my mind, that illustrates this idea was Grameen’s partnership with the world famous yogurt company Danone. Realizing that many of the poorest Bangaladeshis couldn’t feed their children nutritious and affordable food, the joint venture set out to develop a product that would cost less than other similar quality foods on the market, yet provide the same nutrition and convenience as other more expensive items. After lots of market studying, product testing, and business consulting. Grameen Danone developed a fortified yogurt for kids that appealed to the Bangladeshi palate, provided kids with important nutrients (almost half the children of this densely populated nation experienced stunted growth due to malnourishment), and helped create many thousands of jobs for the rural poor. By designing a factory that was small, and located near the source of consumption (rural villages), they could buy local milk and convert it into yogurt and have it back to the people without needing refrigeration because it would be eaten so fast. Considering a country that has little infrastructure, they worked around the impossible problems of not being able to keep the yogurt cold if it was shipped. By bringing the factory to the people, they wouldn’t need to do much other than get the product into the hands of kids. They intend to open more factories around the country after the success they’ve had with the first one, and the best part is, it is a sustainable venture. Both Group Danone and Grameen got back all the initial money invested, and the small profits made will go to continued operation of the current plant, and the startup of more yogurt factories across Bangladesh. Because it is a social business, they don’t have to aim for the highest profit, they just have to break even plus a little, and this allows the yogurt to cost only a few cents – affordable for even very poor families. They even train “Grameen Ladies” to sell the yogurt, educating them about all the benefits of the yogurt, and giving them little insulated purses to carry the yogurts in back to the village where hungry children will eat them. In this way, they’ve employed dairy farmers, these women to trasport and sell the products, and provided a social good, all without the need for donations or making the people pay high costs.

This format of social business has so many applications, and I think more people are recognizing how time, and money, consuming traditional charities and aid interventions tend to be without doing as much good as they intend. I really hope that this social business model takes off because it’s a something we could really use in everything from our American healthcare system to alleviating poverty in the third world.

Anyways, I am done with that little tangent. Life here is going well, though I am very excited to finally have real work to do starting tomorrow.

On Saturday, the couple I am staying with asked me if I wanted to walk into town. Unbeknownst to me, it ended up being about a six miles round trip. We walked clear across Kampala, and it was funny to see how confused the taxi drivers were with us. Why on earth would we rather walk than pay 50 cents to get a ride into town? The exercise was nice, and walking in a place just gives you a different perspective. I saw some other parts of Kampala that day, and it was certainly packed since it was Saturday. Today, we walked to the Bugolobi market, which is the one that is very nearby. The couple lives in a pretty nice neighborhood in Kampala, and many of the nearby apartments house embassy workers from all over. All the tenants of this particular building are Indian, except us. It’s really sad to see how well many of the various Asian groups have done here. They own many of the businesses, and definitely have a lot to show for it. I am really starting to wonder why it is that so many Ugandans don’t do well in their own country. It really does seem sometimes like there is some physiologically difference. But! before you start sending me nasty emails, I really think that is has to do with their education systems and, at times, the culture. I truly believe that Ugandans have the same capacity as any other ethnicity, but that doesn’t mean it has worked out that way in reality. Many Ugandans are hardworking, but don’t have the best business sense, and there are certainly many Ugandans who follow the kind of African laid back view of life, which might not be so conducive to business. Lorna has told me that many of the Ugandans who do the best here are ones who have been educated outside the country – and they do very well. So I don’t actually believe that there is anything physically wrong with Africans, but I do think that generally terrible schools (especially higher education) and a poor business culture have led to a lot of economic failure, while so many foreigners thrive in the same area. In the grocery store in the neighborhood, there were at least as many foreigners as there were Ugandans. In this upscale neighborhood, it is not rich Ugandans that fill the apartments, but mainly just foreign businessmen.

I was also reassured today that it is very unlikely to get malaria in Kampala. However, any doctor you go to will likely tell you that you have in fact contracted malaria. Bill Gates stopped sending malaria test kits to Uganda because even when they would come back negative, the doctors would still insist it was malaria. It also doesn’t help that their word for fever is “malaria.”

On another note, we visited the South African version of Wal-Mart – Game. It has even ricketier things, and the customer service was literally a joke. As we attempted to find a shower curtain, people kept pointing us in all different directions. We finally asked one of the employees, who was standing around and chatting with about five others, to come show us where these mythical curtains were, and she rolled her eyes and slowly ambled across the store. As Lorna always says when something ridiculous, strange, or just plain expected happens here: TIA – This is Africa…

Here is a picture from the slum where the AIESEC house is located. I love this picture :)