What we can all learn from Ethiopia’s Gurage ethnicity about personal finance and Entrepreneurship
The Southern ethnicity of the Gurage is seen in Ethiopia as perhaps the Jews are in the western world. The various stereotypes geared towards mocking their culture of saving and growth goes to show how society’s understanding of an unknown culture can get distorted from the pure version of it. As such, The Gurage are known to other Ethiopian ethnicities as being stingy and that getting money from them is like getting blood from a stone…or a rock, whatever. As anyone else engaged in trade in Ethiopia, they are seen as being full of deception and even thieving. to illustrate the extent of how bad the Ethiopian attitude towards the Gurage is, There is even a saying that goes “If you shake a Gurage’s hand, count your fingers.”. The stereotypes are however far from the truth. These people have a rich culture and are some of the hardest working people in the world that embody entrepreneurship from the Ethiopian perspective.
These days, I have been having problems finding motivation and often seeing myself lack boldness in my decisions, constantly watching every plan I come up with to pivot out of this current rut that I’m in get crippled by fear of the unknown. And one Saturday, after a half day at the office I was taking the train to a friend’s house and stumbled upon a song entitled “Get to work” by an up and coming musician (he’s a DJ, and we are now obligated to call them musicians) named Rophnan. The song is of the EDM genre (Electronic Dance Music to those who have been living in a cave and are unfamiliar with the term), with the beat resembling a modernized and synthetic version of the Gurage music. The song got me thinking about the Gurage culture, and even with the little I knew about their culture, I failed to find a time when they lacked boldness and got crippled by fear of the unknown like I did. Sure enough, I had to do my own research on them and what I found gave me the motivation I needed.
The Gurage are not known in Ethiopia for being war heroes in power like the Amhara, not known for having come up with their own version of Athenian democracy like the Oromo (The Geda System) or anything even slightly political or related to war. There was never a Gurage Emperor that rose to fame, or even recently no Gurage ruler. Their people are known in Ethiopia mainly for two things, their cultural food called Kitfo, and trade. The first one had been incorporated in other Ethiopian cultures and even world wide as one of the most popular Ethiopian foods as the recipe is fairly simple, however, their recipe for trade could not be copied by any other ethnicity.
When a boy reaches the age of 8 or 9, he is given a choice to stay in his home town, or go to the big city and make it. And almost always, they choose the later. They come either to Addis Ababa or any other major city as young as 8 and usually start with shoe shining, which could take a start up capital from 30–50 ETB. They buy a box, a rug, a sponge and some shoe polish and cream. They take water from where they can find it, and they are ready to start business. As for accommodation in an unfamiliar city where living expenses are far higher than their home town, they pool money and get a one room house and live in groups of 5–10. they are very closely integrated and give each other moral and emotional support. They consume just enough to stay alive and save nearly 70–80% of their daily income, in a cultural micro-finance system known as Iqqub. i could not get to the bottom of how Iqqub came to be, but its been around for generations and is known to be one of the inbreed Ethiopian socioeconomic systems.
Iqqub is a form of saving where you are given a quota to meet, which gives you the necessary motivation to be efficient in your work, collected by days end and lent in rotation in the form of a lottery system. For instance, if these shoe shining boys, let’s assume are 10, have a quota of 200 ETB, they work moving from place to place, often strategizing and sticking to the locations where they would find the most customers, and then give the 200 birr(ETB) to the collector, who is also one of the same boys, by days end. And if the Iqqub matures every ten days, by the tenth day, they draw a lottery and one of the boys gets 20,000 Ethiopian Birr by day ten. The boy will then decide to either save or invest in something else, perhaps something to sell whilst he is shining shoes, which could range from Mobile cards to cigarettes to chewing gum and napkins. But the boy doesn’t stop working just because he now has 20,000. He keeps working and another one if the ten boys gets it next time, and so on and so forth.
Pretty soon, the boy brings one of his siblings, or cousins to come and take over the shoe shining box, and moves with the profit he makes to own either a kiosk, or some sort of shop that carries fruits and vegetables, along with either the same ten boys, or new boys from the same Gurage tribe. With his kiosk, he sells consumer merchandise, often staying very late in the night to make sure that there is no opportunity to make more money missed. And as his shoe shining days, he saves through Iqqub, but now on a higher scale. He maintains goof customer relations, has regulars that buy in bulk and handles the commodity shopping of whatever neighborhood he chose to open his kiosk.
A couple of years with that growing his profits and then he will move to either to the distributor business in Merkato, the import business or exports based on what he finds in his informal studies of the market, leaving his kiosk to another family member, who also in turn brings another family member. Even in though the boy is now a man, and light years from his humble beginnings, the culture of saving in the form of Iqqub continues, no unnecessary expenses are indulged, and personal growth never stops. If you look at any Gurage boy in about 20 years from the day he started, he’s almost always a millionaire, a manager of some business and his family of high status in his home town. Even then, its never enough. He starts with 50 birr, and given time he’ll be a millionaire. He passes down his culture and wealth to his kids and ensures that his legacy is not eroded.
Why do the gurages always succeed then? Well, their culture does not encourage looking down on any job, as most cultures do, their culture is about mutual support and growth rather than judgment and envy, their culture doesn’t encourage extravagance but rather promotes saving, they stay away from addictions that make one bleed money like alcohol, they are good to their people often going out of their way to help each other grow…but most of all, they are bold and fearless of going to a place they don’t know and suffering to make ends meet, so long as they can one day come out of it. They have patience and persevere through the low days and still maintain to grind to bring better future for themselves.
And here I ask, why can’t I be like like the Gurage people?
Music: Rophnan — Get to work
