“Help us, Teach us, but don’t Kick us.”
Angola, 2011
The Asabranca market in Cazenga on the outskirts of Luanda, Angola is filled with activity — thousands of informal sector street sellers (mostly women), many overloaded trucks, home-made hand carts pushed by young men, lots of exhaust and dust and, when it rains, mud.
“Where have you been?” the woman asks one of the “mentors” from the USAID funded women’s entrepreneurship project. “You stopped coming, it has been months and we are forgetting what you taught us.” She is about 30 and sits on an upturned plastic bucket. She is holding a wad of cash. Right next to her on her left is a woman selling potatoes; on her other side a woman sits selling plastic flip-flops. I ask the cash lady what she learned from the project. “Many things” she says. “Like what, for example, what did you learn that you didn’t know before?” She hesitates. I repeat the question. She pauses and then tells us that she was learning how to do accounting so she’d know how much profit she was making. That’s good, I say. “So, what is your business?” “I sell used clothing,” she says. “But I don’t see any used clothing here.” I say. She explains that her business is off for now because the supply has become limited. “So what business are you doing today?” I ask. She says she switched to money changing. (The translator with me says this is an illegal activity.)
Fifty yards away, after making our careful way through the mass of buyers and sellers, trying to avoid the tangle of the plastic garbage and miscellaneous detritus that lines every alleyway, we stop at two ladies selling pyramid stacked canned tuna, sardines, canned peas and canned sausages. They look up. Recognizing one of the mentors, one of them says “Where have you been?”
He explains, she nods, and then, after getting her permission to poke my nose in her business, I ask my questions. When did you start this activity, what else did you do before, what product makes you the most money, what have you learned you did not know before, etc. One of the two began 2 years ago after coming to Luanda from the provinces. She has used her own resources, she says, to build up her business. She says she is doing well and affording to support her family, though business now (in January) is down because after Christmas people have less money. She has 6 cases of goods stacked up, on top of which are the cans. She is in her twenties and very lively and blunt — After we speak for 10 minutes she tells us to please move out of the way (there are 5 of us) “you’re blocking my customers.”
I come back to ask more questions. She says she pays about $40 a case for the tuna, and uses her earnings as working capital. She tells us she has never borrowed any microcredit. But she would like someday to open a store — a real one, and to do that she would need a bank loan. She doesn’t know how much, but says she knows her business could work. “How do you know?” I ask. “I know there are customers who want to buy my products.” she answers.
In the car, later on, I ask the mentors if they think it realistic that such sellers can move from the informal to the formal sector (the goal of the USAID project) and just as important, whether they really would want to. If they were operating in the formal sector there would be fixed costs like electricity and rent, employee costs, equipment purchases, maintenance, plus high interest rates on formal capital, regulations to comply with, documents to be provided, fees and bribes (called “gazoza” which means sparkling water) to pay. But here, with none of the above complications, the canned food seller says she is making enough to get by selling four items. When things change, as well they are likely to, she, like the money changing cum clothing seller lady, can quickly switch to another activity or product. She can change her location. Moreover when business is slow, she can enjoy the company of the women who are next to her on both sides and in front and behind.
This project, run by a local NGO with 10 years experience in the fight against HIV/AIDS, was begun in partnership with two institutions, a university business development center which has put together the training materials used by the mentors, and a Portuguese research institute. The NGO, like several others in Angola has had a history of being funded to do short projects (4 months, a year, and now this one — 18 months). Begun with a desire to fight for the poor, they see their big success as helping to get a law passed that gives everyone the right to AIDs medicine. They have worked with sex workers to promote condom use, and continued to work in HIV/AIDS until they could not get more funding. Like other NGOs in Angola (perhaps even more so) they live a hand-to-mouth existence, losing staff and gaining staff as one project ends and another begins. They refer to this syndrome as “projectization.” Their founder and director tells us he works for $400 a month, anywhere from an eighth to a tenth of what he might make in the private sector with his education. One of the persons who attended a USAID training workshop in Johannesburg, subsequently left and the other, an Angolan born and raised in Zimbabwe, spends time back in Zimbabwe and his continuity with the project (he is listed as its coordinator) is unclear.
They have had some funding from British Petroleum, from a Catholic European NGO named Trocaire, and are in a relationship with U.S. NGO called World Learning as a small part of their USAID funded anti-Malaria project. A year ago they were approached by Population Services Int’l (PSI) another U.S. based NGO, who, they told me, took their data on sex workers and went off and got a grant without including them. [In December, 2010, PSI and World Learning were awarded an $8.3 million USAID anti-HIV-AIDS project for Angola.]
As I sit with the 5 people from the organization in their offices, I hear an increasingly blunt and impassioned set of complaints — the office is spare and they have no internet; it is only because one of the staff has a husband with a good job that they have internet access through her, when she goes home at night. We learn that two of those present no longer officially work for the organization because there was no budget for them to continue but they came in to meet me because they hoped USAID (for which I am consulting) might hear what they have to say, through me. They explain that when they began working, they opened a center for entrepreneurship which they view as the core of the project. The intention was that the women would want to come to get information, to make copies of needed documents and to learn. They have (or had) three mentors (the project agreement called for 10). But for some months now they have been inactive, and the center has been closed.
Later that day I visit the center and note the mud on the ground around it — it is close to inaccessible when it rains. The roof leaks, the building is small and there are cracks in the walls. They wanted me to see this in order to press the point that they have no resources to make it workable. On the wall facing the street, in large letters, is the USAID Logo — “From the American People.” The paint on the sign is cracking.
The center was closed because they could not pay the rent and the landlord threatened to take the computers in compensation. They deftly removed them to their offices. They let go of two people because they had no money for salaries and the mentors have therefore not visited the market ladies since September. And all of this, they tell me with considerable passion, is because USAID/Luanda did not transfer their grant funds. They waited 4 to 5 months without funds and then when the project money began to flow again, a month ago, instead of receiving all they were owned in one go they only got the first missing month, and have waited till January to get the 2nd one.
Their operations manager, who works partly as a volunteer, says that she went to the U.S. embassy asking to see the USAID person who supervises the grant they are working under. She was told she could not see him because she had no appointment. She tried again and said she would wait. When she called, she says, the calls did not go through and were not responded to. In November the group sent a letter to the USAID Mission program director in Luanda and did not get a response. In the meantime, some of their staff left and those who stayed were not getting paid. One person died of malaria, she says, because without his salary he could not buy medicine. She adds, “and the market ladies complain to us when we begin seeing them less often.” “You know,” they say, “you are just like the rest. You talk and you don’t do anything. You come here and waste our time.” “You know,” this staff member continues, “these ladies are tough, they have had to fight for everything, their lives are not for joking, and they think we are joking with them.“ “What we are trying to do, what USAID wants us to do, this is based on achieving trust with the clients. But now they don’t trust us anymore.”
“After we learned a little from USAID of what the cause of the funding delay was — and we still don’t really understand it — we tried to explain to the ladies why we couldn’t come anymore, that we didn’t have the money. But that’s not our problem, they said.“
“I know we have lots of things to change. We have to change, but we have to be taught. We are slow — I know — but that is Angola. But don’t kick us. OK, you (USAID) are the best, but you are going to leave. You have to show us the best way to work. Teach us, help us, but don’t kick us, and in the end leave us with nothing.”
