SILC

  The highlight of my time in Karatu was our second to last day in the field, when we had our first chance to meet a SILC group.
  Of course, we couldn't actually talk to any of them because none of them speak English, but the Synovate supervisor translated for us. There were two groups we met from that village, one with about 12 members and the other with about 25. The fist group had completed three cycles, and the second group was about to finish its first (a cycle consists of about 9 to 12 months of saving, borrowing, and repaying loans, followed by a "share out" celebration in which the money is disbursed according to each member's saving level). Both groups said that SILC encouraged them to earn and save money, plan ahead in their expenditures, and provided them with money in emergencies. Two other things they mentioned were that it allowed them to pay lumpsum school fees and provided women the opportunity to invest or buy things without having to depend on their husband for money.

The first SILC group

All these things are interesting to note, and I think they are all beneficial aspects of the SILC program. Like I mentioned in the previous post, both the lack of social safety nets and the inability to prepare in advance for hard times help lead to the hardships villagers face. As a result, I believe it is a good thing if SILC provides a safety net for emergencies and encourages people to save money and plan expenditures in advance (of course, these effects have to be studied carefully, and it's not a good idea to just assume they are beneficial even if it seems obvious. For example, "encouraging saving" could be a bad thing if people feel pressure to save money when they really need to use it now. But I digress). In this post, I'd like to focus on the last two aspects of the SILC program that the groups mentioned, because I think their importance is a little less obvious.

A member of the second group making a deposit

   Education is organized much differently in Tanzania than it is in the U.S. In Tanzania, students must pass an exam after their seventh year of school in order to continue on to secondary school. They then take exams after four and six years of secondary school, continuing their education only if they pass each exam. According to the enumerators, about half of urban students will make it to secondary school, and only between 10 and 15% will make it on to university. In the villages this rate is much lower - about 10% will make it to secondary school, and virtually none will complete it.
   There are several obstacles that prevent most villagers from obtaining a full education. As I alluded to in the previous post, children are expected to play a large role in farm and house work from an extremely young age. Thus many have little if any time to spend on homework or studying once they get home from school, and may even be kept out of school to help at home. In addition, parents are required to pay school fees in advance of each school term (even primary education is not free here). Since villagers face many obstacles to saving in advance, they often struggle to pay these fees upfront. SILC loans allow parents to pay school fees over a longer period of time in smaller amounts, which helps remove a major obstacle to keeping kids in school. Without SILC, obtaining a loan for school fees at a reasonable rate is impossible for many villagers (SILC loans are usually repaid over 3 months with 5 to 10% interest). It may not seem immediately obvious (except perhaps for those paying college tuition), but the access to reasonable credit terms that SILC provides may do a lot to increase the educational opportunities of villagers.
   The second effect of SILC, which is the financial independence and empowerment it gives to women, is something that I did not grasp the importance of unti coming here (SILC accepts both men and women, but as you can see in the picture below, the majority of actual members are women). Many (I could probably say most) of the women in the villages truly are treated as second-class citizens. The enumerators tell me that women do most of the farmwork, carry most of the water, do virtually all the cooking, cleaning, and childbearing, and (this I was especially surprised by) usually build the houses. Giving women the ability to save the money they earn for themselves is a positive aspect of SILC, if for no other reason than that it gives women at least a little bit of freedom. Not only does SILC allow women to keep the money they earn, it may also give them a greater say in household expenditures.
   Such freedom might not seem quite so important in the U.S., where women decide who they marry and usually make financial decisions with their husband. But here men decide what to do with whatever money comes in to the household. From what we've seen and heard, this sadly seems to usually be to buy alcohol, even when food and other necessities are scarce.
   Although I would like to think that a household would, in general, receive the same benefit whether the husband or wife controlled finances, the reality seems to be that women and men in the village have different priorities. In most cases, women seem more intent on providing necessities for the household, which makes it especially important for village women to gain more control over their earnings. Like I said, I think giving women greater control over their income is a good thing regardless of whether the husband is wasteful or not. But based on what we've seen, it seems like for most village families there are also many benefits to the household beyond women's empowerment, such as a shifting of priorities toward providing food, shelter, etc.
So those are my reflections on the brief, translated comments we received from the SILC groups (sorry mine were not so brief). I have to say, it was nice to just listen to what SILC members thought about the program without prompting them with the questions on the survey. Here are pictures of Katie and I with the two groups. Next stop the Rift Valley of Western Kenya!

A Poor Harvest

   Well it is a few degrees colder than I thought it was going to be when I decided not to bring a sweatshirt. Although we are still in the Northern Hemisphere (3 degrees North of the equator, according to my GPS), July is the coldest time of year here, and in addition, we are at an altitude of about 5900 feet (also according to my GPS). So it is a bit chilly, at least at night and in the morning.

Many houses offer little protection from the cold and rain.

   We began this week in Arusha, which is right next to Mt. Meru and not far from Kilimanjaro. From Arusha, Kilimanjaro blends in extremely well with the somewhat hazy sky, and you can only see it certain parts of the day. From where we were, it looks exactly like a cloud. Only after looking carefully can you distinguish the base beneath its white peak from the sky. Arusha is a bit touristy, as it is near numerous national parks. It is green and lush, and houses a large cultural museum, conference center, the U.N. Rwandan Criminal Tribunal, and the newly created African Union Court. In short, it is a relatively prosperous, beautiful city.
   We stayed in Arusha for three nights before heading two hours north to Karatu. Karatu is a setting off point for safaris - it is within driving distance of Serengetti National Park, as well as Ngongoro Crater and Lake Manyara. I'll be putting up pictures of our trip to Lake Manyara soon.

Here's one.

   The town itself is small, dusty, and remote. It suffers from chronic power outages, which (I am told by many sources), are largely the result of government corruption. In fact, power outages are a major problem in Tanzania, and have caused production to drop and unemployment to rise as factories cannot run at full capacity. Luckily our hotel has a generator, and so we have electricity for a few hours each day. However, there is no heat and no internet - the only internet cafe in town has not been able to operate during business hours due to power outages. The one day when we came back from the field after dark (we try to avoid this for safety reasons, as many people and vehicles do not have reflective clothing or proper lighting), the entire town was pitch black.
   We are not quite as much of a spectacle here as we were in Mwanza, and the enumerators speak more English. The villages are dusty and dry, and as usual the fields look mostly dead. It is the middle of harvesting time right now, and in many homes people are sifting grain, laying out maize to dry, taking beans out of pods, etc. However, many people are remarkably idle. There is not as much work to be done as there is most years at this time. In the village centers we see men idling about and drinking all hours of the day (we usually arrive around 9 in the morning and leave at 5).

                                                                  Typical field of maize

   It is clear to the enumerators that many people in the villages will go hungry in the next few months. The villagers' crops (on which they largely rely for food) are completely at the mercy of the rain. Although the soil is rich, there is no irrigation and so if it does not rain the crops die. It is nearly impossible to save up for hard times in good years for at least two reasons. First, the villagers do not have a good way to store grain for long periods of time, and so if they have excess crops they end up selling them at sharply reduced prices to businessmen from the cities. Second, there is a culture of sharing (called ujamaa, which means "familyhood") in Tanzania that tends to discourage saving for the future. Until recently it was law (and in most villages it still is, de facto) that if you have extra food and someone asks you for something to eat, you have to give it to them. In fact, the enumerators said that even in this hard year, if I, a complete stranger who has plenty to eat, were to ask a villager for food, they would be obliged to give it to me. Thus if someone produces a large amount of food, they will probably end up giving most of it away.
  This arrangement is obviously prone to abuse, and takes away much of the incentive to work hard. However, in a society that lacks governmental safety nets, crop insurance, etc. and where starvation is a real danger, I can see why it has survived. Without the mutual agreement that people will share whatever they have with everyone else, the villagers would probably have no where to turn when crops failed. Such a system may discourage hard work and lower overall productivity, but it may at least help to prevent starvation.
   Thus villagers have little to gain from growing more than they can eat in a year. Instead of saving up for bad years, they mostly depend on the food they were able to produce in the previous harvest. The fact that this is a poor harvest means that people all over Eastern Africa are going to face extreme hardship in the next year, if they aren't already (in fact, food shortages in Somalia have already led to a refugee crisis in Kenya).
   This is a pretty depressing post, and I was thinking of some way to end on a lighter note. However, the truth is that a good part of my trip has been spent seeing depressing things. There was a boy in Malindi I met who I remember thinking was probably7 or 8. The enumerator I was with asked him how old he was, and he said 15. When I remember how small he was, I still can't believe it. We've seen children who have begun to lose skin and hair due to malnutrition, children with crossed eyes and bloated stomachs. Another particularly sad sight was of a little girl, probably 5 or 6 years old, struggling to herd a group of cattle.
   It's hard to see people in such terrible circumstances and not do anything to help. We do actually go to people's houses to conduct the interviews, and it is not rare to be confronted with extreme poverty. It can be heart-wrenching to go into a house, clearly see that a family is enduring hunger, sickness, and hopelessness that I and those near to me will never have to endure, and then just stand up and leave after an hour.
   I can now see more clearly the importance of stuyding developing nations and how their people can become more prosperous. It is difficult to see such extreme poverty, but it is necessary in order to study it. And hopefully that will help shorten the time it takes, in the technologically advanced world in which we live, for the people I've met to stop having to depend on the rain to feed their families.

   

Mwanza

   After Malindi, our next destination was Mwanza, Tanzania's second largest city. Our flight from Nairobi to Mwanza actually consisted of two legs, with a short layover at Kilimanjaro International Airport near Arusha. On the flight we passed right by Kilimanjaro, and it was a breathtaking sight. Its snow-covered peak rose above a solid floor of clouds, and it seemed almost level with our plane. Someday I'll have to come back and climb it. From Kilimanjaro it was a short flight to Mwanza, which is located on the shore of Lake Victoria.

View of the lake from our hotel

   We could tell almost immediately that Mwanza is not quite the same as the other places we've been to. It has an international airport, and we saw quite a collection of aircraft there. However, there were only two small commercial jets - the rest were U.N. helicopters. These helicopters are used to deliver aid and peacekeeping troops to Congo, which is not far away. Unlike Nairobi and Malindi, Mwanza is not a tourist destination. Instead, its main industry is fishing (Lake Victoria's potential for recreational use is somewhat sullied by the presence of Bilharzia, a parasite that makes it unwise to enter the water). Another characteristic that separates Mwanza (and Tanzania in general) from Kenya is that English is not widely spoken. After the now-familiar greetings, people here keep speaking Swahili.
   Our work in the field is also much different than it was in Kenya. We have more trouble communicating with the enumerators than we did in Kenya, and the enumerators often have trouble communicating with the respondents, who seem less likely to speak Swahili. We are also much more of a novelty here than we were in Kenya, probably because, as I mentioned earlier, Mwanza is not a tourist destination. Within minutes of sitting down for an interview, we would often attract crowds of 20, 30, and sometimes even more curious onlookers. It is not uncommon for little kids to bravely come up behind me, lightly touch my arm, and then quickly turn and run away. The disturbances we caused at the first few interviews have forced us to limit our interviews to those held in more remote locations.
   The people here seem better off than the villagers in Malindi, but that is not saying much. It is very dry and dusty here, but the houses are a bit larger and seem more sound. I've noticed many more metal roofs than I saw in Malindi, and the walls are built with bricks or concrete instead of mud and sticks. Land is not as scarce in Tanzania as it is in Kenya, and in fact many Kenyans migrate to Tanzania for this reason. People here are extremely poor, but children here seem at least slightly better clothed and less undernourished than they did in Malindi.
   Our hotel overlooks Lake Victoria, and the view is spectacular. The area around Mwanza is more like what I expected Africa to look like than Nairobi and Malindi. There are enormous plains punctuated with large freestanding boulders that are reminscent of Pride Rock. You'd want to be careful reenacting the presentation of Simba, however. These rocks are the natural habitat of cobras, who pose a real danger to the villagers (especially children). A member of our CRS team saw one outside a village during the Tanzanian pilot survey, and was surprised to see the villagers bring the circle of life to an abrupt and ruthless close.
   Perhaps the most striking difference between Mwanza and Kenya, however, is the level of development. There are no glittering towers of commerce in Mwanza, no shopping malls flanked by highways. In Kenya we saw pieces of the first and third world side by side, here there are only small bits of the world we left behind in June. The streets are lined with small, ramshackle shops, markets spill out into the streets, and in general things seem overcrowded and disorderly. It is a strange environment, and an interesting one.
   Well that's about it for Mwanza - please let me know if you have any questions / comments. Tomorrow we head back toward Kilimanjaro to survey the Arusha area!

Obamaverse

  If Barak Obama doesn't win reelection in 2012, I'm pretty sure he could easily get elected President of Kenya. Obama is huge here. There are Obama Cafes everywhere, and we see him on hats, bags, shirts, etc. There is even a drink called "the Obama" (a large mug of fruit juice). I think it's safe to say that Obama is the most popular politician in Kenya, and is more popular there than he is in the U.S.
  This near universal love of Barak Obama is a surprising difference between the popular cultures of the U.S. and Eastern Africa. There are many others. One of the most obvious is the importance of religion. In the places we have travelled, there are churches everywhere, mostly Christian but also many Mosques. Christian music is extremely popular, and numerous television and radio stations are run by religious groups or devoted to playing Christian music. On Sunday you can hear loud music and singing emanating from simple churches, and throughout the day prayers are broadcast over loudspeakers from mosques.
  Another major difference that we quickly noticed is that people are generally more laid back here. People do not seem as busy, or in as much of a hurry. In addition to making it easier for us to find willing respondents to our survey, this has led to some interesting challenges. For example, when we ask villagers how much farther we have to walk or drive before we reach a respondent, they almost always tell us we are almost there, just a little farther. In many cases we will not reach our destination for over an hour after being assured that we are "almost there." We have had days where we have had to drive 3 or more hours to get to a village, but we have never heard anything other than "you are almost there, just a little farther."
  Family structures are also much different here than in the U.S. We rarely see young men at the houses we go to, although there are plenty of children and women of all ages. We are told that most girls are married around the ages of 13 to 15. Men must pay a bridal price in order to marry, and as a result most men do not get married until they are much older. Most young men leave the villages to find work in cities, while girls stay either in their village or the village of the man they are married to. It is not uncommon for a wealthy man to have multiple wives - one of the people we worked with said his father had 6 wives and 30 children. The families are also much larger than a typical American family. We are told that families of ten children or so are not uncommon, and this seems about right based on what we have seen.
  A few other differences include the popularity of soccer (every village has a pitch), and the number of bike riders. Most people don't have cars, so people will load belongings and people (we have seen up to four at a time) on their bikes. The most popular music seems to be raggae and rap, and while we recognize many songs as American, many others are clearly from Africa. One really nice thing about Africa is that they have channels that play just music videos - probably like what used to exist in the U.S. before someone decided it would be more interesting to videotape people living in a house together. People dress very similarly to how we dress in America. And I don't just mean this from a fashion standpoint - American university and sports apparell is extremely common (Bufallo swimming, Eastern Washington football, etc). I have also seen shirts with slogans such as "Girl Scouts of Colorado." I'm not exactly sure where these come from, but it definitely seems a bit strange.
  One other important difference: there is no comparison between the airlines here and those at home. The Kenyan and Tanzanian airlines are so much better. We have had no major delays, security is quick and service has been great. There are some things that I miss about home, but the airlines are not one of them.

Malindi

We have now completed five days of surveying after our pilot run in Ngecha, and I would like to describe both the villages we have been to and what "field work" is like. The reality of Kenyan village life and the challenges of collecting data have both been quite eye opening for me. The extreme circumstances in which the villagers live and the obstacles we face gathering information about their lives are things that I could never have imagined before coming here.
The villages we have been to are all within a fairly short distance of each other, but they are surprisingly diverse. Some of the areas are reasonably lush, but many are quite dry and in general this region is currently suffering from a prolonged drought. This has clearly affected the villagers' livelihoods. Food is scarce and in many cases large fields of maize are completely dead. One can only imagine how much hard work was wasted planting those fields.
The villages we have been to do not have access to running water or electricity. Women carry jugs of water on their heads from wells, which in many cases are several kilometers away. A few households have motorcycles, and while the roads are not paved and are quite poor, so far all the villages have been accessible by our ten passenger vans. The houses are made of stick, rock, and mud walls with thatched roofs made of palm leaves. Some of the nicer stores and houses have corrugated metal roofs which provide better cover and require less maintenance, but this is beyond the reach of most families. The houses are often in disrepair, and repairing them is quite time consuming and labor intensive (in fact, I am told they only last for about two years). The houses are small (usually one, sometimes two rooms), and they provide shelter for large families. It seems that children are everywhere, and virtually every woman we have interviewed has a baby.
The enumerators refer to the houses as "homesteads," and I think this is a good description. The houses seem reminscent of sod homesteads from the old West. Cooking takes place over small campfires, sometimes in a small hut but often outdoors. There are no bathroom facilities of any kind, and people have few possessions. Almost none of the children have shoes, and most of the adults go barefoot as well. There are some chickens and goats (who often live in the houses), and each village has a few herds of cattle. The main crop is maize, although in one village the houses were surrounded by palm trees. These are an important source of income as they can be used to produce palm oil and cocunut wine, and as a result this village was wealthier than the other villages I have been to.
I have posted pictures of some of the houses we have visited on facebook, maybe later I'll put them up here if I can figure out a good way to do it. As I said earlier, the places we have been are surprisingly diverse, but I think these pictures provide a reasonably representative picture of the places we have been to. I wish I could be taking more pictures, but several factors have kept me from taking as many as I would like. The first is that I am working, and so I feel it would be unprofessional in many cases to take a break to take pictures. In addition, I do not want to take pictures of people without first asking their permission, and this is difficult since I do not speak their language. As a result I usually wait until the interviews are complete, and try to take pictures a reasonable distance from the homes so that people are not clearly visible.
Now for "the field." We have been leaving the hotel by around 8 each morning, and arriving at the first village between 9 and 10:30. The villages are not too far from Malindi, but the roads are poor and our directions often are too, and so it can take a while. The first thing we do when we get to the village is to meet up with the village chief. This is a hereditary position, and while I'm not sure exactly what powers the chief has, in general the chiefs seem to be signficantly better off than the other villagers. At any rate, they are essential for directing us to where our respondents are - without them locating the respondents would be next to impossible. The survey takes anywhere from 1 to 2 hours to administer, depending on how well the respondent speaks Swahili (many speak only a local language), and how long it takes to find the respondent once their house has been located.
I would have thought the second factor would be a much bigger obstacle than it has been. However, most of the respondents work near their homes, in fields that are right next to the houses. People are surprisingly willing to take an hour or two out of their day with little or no warning, dropping whatever work they were doing to complete the interview. It seems that the villagers' home and work lives are much more intertwined than in our society, where there are more clearly defined work spaces and times. The villagers were extremely welcoming, and were generally very cooperative with the survey.
While getting the respondents to cooperate was much easier than I would have expected, the logistics of surveying a random sample of the population was a tremendous challenge. Luckily Synovate handled most of these details, but conducting accurate surveys in 2 villages each day that we had never been to before required a lot of tenacity and planning ahead. Most days the surveying would not be finished until around 6 or 7, giving us just enough time to get a late dinner before the restaurants in Malindi closed down around 9 (our favorite place, Johandis, served dinners that I often could not finish for the equivalent of 1 or 2 U.S. dollars).
Well hopefully that gives you a picture of what Malindi and the work I am doing are like. More to come soon I promise, and if you have any questions just post them and I'll try my best to answer.