One week from today, I will be leaving to return to the States, so our team is in a sprint to the finish line this week. We have made good progress in devising a solution to the challenge of prohibitively high secondary school fees. The team has decided to found a cooperative appropriately named "United for Education" or "Abashyizehamwe Muburezi" to save and invest funds to pay tuition. It will be governed by a six year, renewable contract that the team has written over the last week.
Funds will be raised with two investment projects. One will be buying and selling crops, namely sorghum, in different seasons simply for the purpose of providing cash. The second investment will be opening the first library in Nyarubuye. In addition to generating revenue from book rentals and subscription memberships, the library is important because it will provide the community with adult education workshops and a lighted space to work at night, which will be especially helpful for students who need to study. Moreover, the project gives the team the flexibility to grow and evolve over the years. The process of arriving at this combination of projects was filled with many highs and lows, some of which I will share here:
Highlights:
Commitment of the team. I was nervous last week to ask the team to take four afternoons to work on our project, so I was thrilled when they insisted that we really needed to meet everyday. One of the women on my team exhorted that women are the "chiefs of the house," and if development happens, it will come from them. Our team of women all seem to believe this, and I love when I find them meeting or talking around town in addition to out meetings. These ladies make me smile every day.
Writing the contract. This should have been the most tedious and boring part of the project, but our team flew through negotiations of the structure of their group. I was particularly impressed with the governance committee they outlined to organize the cooperative and manage its investments. In Haiti, it was hard to know if and how any legal agreement would be enforced, and I was surprised by how much my team respected the idea of a contract. My favorite part? A clause that includes a steep pentaly fee for any member that tries to use their portion of the savings for anything other than the payment of school fees.
Willingness to borrow and save. I cannot overstate how important this is. During the Immersion phase of the Innovation Institute, many of the community members we met expressed anxiety about using banks and hesitation about their own abilities to take and pay back loans. The fact that my team so quickly decided that both saving and borrowing must be a part of their solution is exciting (note: this was their idea, not mine), and it further demonstrates the degree to which they believe in one another and the team.
Challenges:
Defining profit. My team has had many creative ideas for businesses they can open to generate profits to save for school, but I worry that many of them will not actually make any money. I have built a simple budget and a very basic financial model outlining expected revenues and costs for the next six years, and this concept seems novel to the team. For example, my team is considering renting an expensive house for the library space rather than sharing with another group, and I have tried to show how the rental expense will affect out savings account balance each year. There are limits to how many times I can say that revenues must be greater than costs, but I am hoping that some of these conversations will encourage the team to ask different questions of one anothr in the future.
Financing. It is not as simple as it sounds to open and use a bank account. The local SACCO (lending institution run by the government) promises an easy process to apply for loans with a low interest rate of 2% annually, but the college educated scholars is finding it confusing to figure out exactly which papers and business plans to prepare with our teams. What exactly qualifies as a sufficient project also remains unclear. Our goal is to have all of the paperwork sorted so that our teams are ready to apply for loans before we leave.
Outlining next steps. The objective of our work here is to have projects that our design teams can and will continue themselves after we leave. There are a hundred details I want to sort out this week, and it is hard to know where to focus my attention. I am trying to prepare a basic list of next steps, especially in terms of formally registering the cooperative and opening all necessary bank accounts, in addition to outlining some targets for the longer-term, but I want the team to be setting the pace and direction and running our meetings. Its is hard to know when to push and when to step back and let the group make its own decisions.
We are learning from these highs and lows as well as from the feedback of others in the community. For the next few days, we will continue to refine and tweak our ideas, and then we will present our project at the Innovation Exhibition this coming Wednesday. We are expecting tapproximately 1,000 attendees, including people from surrounding communities, local government leaders, and representatives of local banks and financial institutions. I look forward to watching team present all of their work!
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