The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World

by Jacqueline Novogratz

  "That would be a good thing," Constance said. "I may not have much of a head for business, but I like to see people working."

  I told her I'd take a look at the economics involved in growing sunflowers and pressing the seeds into oil to determine if the project could grow strong enough to justify a loan. I'd seen too many well-intentioned projects like this one fail, in part because the donors weren't interested in seeing it become sustainable. They would insist on doing projects that had little to do with making a business work. But I was still hopeful.

  Constance was right: She had no real head for business, but her heart was made of gold, and her spiritual commitment to seeing God in work and not just prayer was one I deeply admired. But running a business requires a tough side, too. It turned out that the idea for the sunflower project came from a Canadian donor, and Constance was happy just to try it with his money. When we looked at the economics of her small field against the price of sunflower oil, it quickly became clear that this couldn't be more than a charity project unless we expanded the land significantly.

  "Unless the donor is willing to pay a large amount every year, this project won't succeed for very long right now," I told her.

  "But God will provide," she said.

  "Ah, that is a different story," I said.

  In the end, Constance decided she wanted more for her people as well. The sunflower project, she concluded, was indeed a lovely way to teach women how to grow and process the seeds, but it wouldn't succeed in the long term. It also wouldn't fit the criteria for our new organization, for we were going to concentrate on small businesses that could be run by and for Rwandans and could make a long-term difference in people's lives.

  And we would make loans, not grants. "It doesn't feel as good as grants," Constance told me, "but the women will learn more and grow stronger." From then on, Constance became a great storyteller for our new organization, helping wealthy and poor alike understand the power of giving each individual the tools of credit so she would have the potential to change her own life. "We are not handing out gifts," she would say, "but are bringing forth the gifts inside the people themselves."

  Agnes, the third parliamentarian, was the true politician of the triumvirate. Not one to be seen with her hands dirty, she would nonetheless often travel to the rural areas to give speeches and what she called animation-talks of encouragement. She was always kind and extremely disciplined in her commitment to the organization, but she struck me as someone who loved the trappings of her office-the title, the pageantry, the feeling of holding an audience in her thrall as she spoke. Her desire to raise women's economic and social statuses was authentic, but vanity and a focus on the self were equally parts of her.

  The leader, the dreamer, and the politician: These three women gave political heft, visibility, and heart to our new organization. UNICEF's backing bolstered our credibility as well, and there were a lot of other individual supporters. Notable among them was Annie Mugwaneza, a white Belgian woman with straight red hair in a pageboy cut that framed her freckled face. Annie never wore a trace of makeup on her heavily lidded eyes fringed with blonde lashes, and her daily uniform was a blue cotton skirt and either a white, button-down blouse with a Peter Pan collar or a T-shirt, everything as plain and understated as she was.

  Annie Mugwaneza, born Annie Roland, had lived in Rwanda nearly 20 years by the time I met her. She had come to the country as a missionary and then fallen in love with a tall, handsome Rwandan named Jean Mugwaneza. After the two decided to marry, Annie never left. Marrying a Rwandan meant that if she ever left him, she would have no right under Rwandan law to raise their children outside the country without her husband's permission. Legally, the children were the father's property. I never asked Annie how much she'd thought about the future when she married Jean. She always seemed to enjoy her life and was fully committed to Rwanda.

  Annie had several sons, which gave her some measure of stature in a society where boys are the preferred gender. She was a good mother, a good wife, and someone who could be outspoken while working on behalf of all women, not just the privileged ones. This little band of women led our charge as we lined up potential funders and gained commitments from various agencies to help with business planning and training. We created bylaws and drew up a work plan for the next 6 months. I had already extended my stay, and UNICEF agreed to cover my additional expenses. I moved from UNICEF's guesthouse to a rented room in a Canadian aid worker's airy home that featured a zebra skin on the wall, a garden out back, and the occasional friendly snake that made its way inside.

  I continued to learn about business as usual in the development world. Once, as part of a "social mobilization" effort, UNICEF hired an expensive Italian designer to create a poster campaign aimed at convincing women to vaccinate their children. The posters were gorgeous photographs of women and children with simple messages written in Kinyarwanda about the importance of vaccinating every child. They were perfect, except for the fact that the extremely low female literacy rate in Rwanda made it likely that words written even in Kinyarwanda would have little impact. Much better would have been pictures that told stories-or even better, messages integrated into songs that could have been sung by the women and passed from one to another as they walked the hillsides. Just seeing this process, though, helped me to think differently about how to design future messages and programs, how to move away from our own view of how things should be done and observe how people live and communicate with one another.

  My learning curve could not have been steeper, but I was coming to relish this new country, feeling like an explorer on weekends, surrounded by eclectic friends who were adventurers living life to the hilt. Most were young and, unlike the ones I'd met at that first dinner, all were hopeful and hardworking, a mix of North Americans, Italians, French, and one outlandish Zairean musician named Leonel who wrote a song called "Fucking Cozy Kigali." We'd all dance to it and other music at Cosmos nightclub, a dark, cramped box of a place in Nyamirambo.

  At Chez Lando, a local hangout, we ate shish kebabs and grilled bananas and washed down our meals with Rwandan beer. During lunch breaks, I would run up and down the hills of Kigali with children scampering behind me laughing and shouting, "Muzungu, muzungu," or "white person." The European expatriates thought I was insane for running in the midday sun to the tunes on a Walkman, but they chalked it up to my being American.

  I was living in borrowed houses as I'd kept my inexpensive one-bedroom flat in Nairobi. Since I'd originally come to Kigali for just a 3-week feasibility study, my plans to stay always hinged on the next phase of work: I'll do this for another 6 months until things are stable was my mantra. Envisioning only a short tenure, I tended to stay with friends in their homes or rent big, empty houses by myself.

  With neither a telephone nor a television, I did a lot of reading: Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee, Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong'o. I fell in love with African writers, captivated by the starkness of their words and the richness of their worlds. On weekends, my friends and I would pile into jeeps and drive for hours. It was nothing to drive 7 hours oneway early Saturday morning to visit the green, lush hills of Massissi in Zaire and then turn around on Sunday night and drive back home. We would go windsurfing and fishing in gorgeous Lake Kivu and drive through Akagera National Park, which was largely destroyed during the genocide in 1994. We made our way to Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi, and would wander through the streets and eat tiny fried fish and French fries on the shores of the lake. For elites, Rwanda offered great adventures in some of the world's most beautiful settings.

  But Rwanda is a place of highs and lows: The juxtaposition of some of the most wonderful experiences of my life with the everyday realities in Kigali created, at times, a jarring sense of schizophrenia. Starting anything new is an all-encompassing proposition, and typically I worked 16-hour days. Doing this in a different language, in a place far from home, where navigating even simple things could thwart the best intentions cha
llenged me to my bones. There were plenty of nights when the sheer injustice of the world in which I lived would come crashing down. With no means of communication other than letters, a sense of isolation would envelop me, and there were nights that ended in tears of tiredness and sadness for a world that didn't seem to want to see the possibilities right there in front of it. In those times, I would turn to music. Peter Gabriel, Joni Mitchell, Carole King, and Cat Stevens began to feel like good friends on lonely nights.

  Mornings were better. I started most days with a run as dawn was breaking and returned exhilarated. When all was said and done, the Rwandan women and I were making real progress. There was great excitement in the capital that a new institution for women was being created by locals, not just by expatriates. Within months, we'd registered the organization, signed off on the bylaws, created a board, and raised local money. We were funded and ready to go.

  The founding members gathered one evening to announce the registration of Duterimbere at the Women's Network office, where about 40 women filled the sparsely furnished room to the bursting point. The air was crackling with electricity, and again I had the sense that history was being made-but this time, I was part of it. After Prudence introduced me, I spoke in French with resolve and tremendous excitement, and they craned their necks toward me and applauded throughout my speech. I felt intoxicated by the sheer joy of that first step.

  After the meeting, Prudence, wearing a black and red dress, her hair smoothed back elegantly, whispered in her girlish giggle that she thought most of the women had probably understood only half of what I was saying. "Sometimes your French is so funny," she said, adding that at least everyone had felt my passion completely, and it was that, not my facility with language, that they had applauded.

  Embarrassed that my French was still so clumsy, I apologized profusely. She smiled, put her hands on my shoulders, and looked me in the eye.

  "You should never worry about such small things," she counseled. "Language has very little to do with the words you say and everything with how you say them. Everyone understands what you are doing, even if the words sometimes don't follow."

  Then she added, "And just so you know, we also like very much how you dance, for you listen to your own rhythm there, too."

  Despite my having given a speech that few could understand, we launched what would become one of the largest lenders to the Rwandan poor. We had yet to make a loan, but we had a governing structure, money, contacts, and an amazing amount of heart-and we were a local organization created by and for Rwandan women.

  After assisting Duterimbere to get on its feet, I couldn't leave until I helped it at least learn to walk. I extended my contract again and returned to Nairobi for a week or so to pick up a few pieces of clothing and favorite things. I did know we had no choice in Rwanda but to succeed.

  We asked the Rwandan women to contribute some of their own money, despite being told by "the experts," who were far better at theory than practice, that women were too poor to give anything. Though the women didn't have much, nearly everyone we met donated what they could, helping to build a real partnership with local participation.

  The members of the founding group put their reputations, their time, and whatever money they could find on the line. After we raised money locally, UNICEF provided our first grant of $50,000. Bilge Ogun Bassani also supported us by giving us a temporary office, drivers when we needed them, a stamp of legitimacy, and my salary, too. I learned the importance of giving different kinds of people seats at the table early in order to bring new ideas to reality.

  Now all we had to do was determine how to make loans-and how to get the money back. It sounded so simple.

  CHAPTER 4

  BASKET ECONOMICS AND

  POLITICAL REALITIES

  "If you don't like the way the world is, you change it. You have an obligation to change it. You just do it one step at a time."

  -MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN

  efore we began lending money, our little group met for the first time as a board, though it was unlike any board meeting I'd imagined. Honorata picked me up on a Saturday afternoon and we drove together to Veronique's home, to find her wearing a white cotton dressing gown and a full cast on her left leg. Her hair was standing straight on end, and her eyes looked sunken, as if she hadn't slept in weeks, a likely situation given the crying baby she was rocking in her arms. "Meet your newest Rwandan daughter," she said to me, smiling as she put the tiny girl in my arms and turned around to hobble to the couch.

  Rumor had it that Veronique's husband had pushed her, causing her to fall down a hill and break her leg. I couldn't imagine this powerful woman allowing herself to be bullied by anyone, especially not when she had a tiny baby in her care. But I remember when she told me that only when women control money will they have the power to walk away from being hurt. We were having lunch together, and she talked for a long time about the horrors of domestic violence. "Here, the courts protect the husbands," she said. "In some ways, beating your wife is expected as part of family unity, and you know they always go after the feisty ones."

  I'd never met a Rwandan woman feistier than Veronique herself, though she had been subdued on that day when sharing stories about women who were the most unsafe in the shelter of their own homes.

  That afternoon at her house, as we waited for the others to arrive, Veronique was her old self, waving her hands as she dreamed aloud about what we could accomplish together. We spoke about umuganda, or community work, that was performed each Saturday morning by everyone in the country, a sort of pulling together to meet Rwanda's needs. In many ways, umuganda was classically Rwandan-highly organized work that everyone was expected to do. In Rwanda, government projects work in large part because the country is so small and organized. When government has a plan to enforce, it has only to pass it on to the country's 14 prefects, who communicate it to the bourgmestres, or local mayors. For umuganda, a community might be told one week to hoe a field; another, to plant trees-all under the supervision of a local official.

  People from the expatriate community are often invited to join. Once, I hoed a field of potatoes with a small group of women, lifting the hoe's wooden handle over my head and then pounding it into the ground over and over again. Though the dirt smelled sweet and the air fresh, it was backbreaking work that lasted for hours. The next day, I could barely stand up straight. My hands were covered with blisters, and every muscle in my body ached.

  Veronique laughed when I told this story. "You are still soft," she offered, "not like Rwandan women."

  And then she added, "You know, umuganda is also a way for the government to ensure that everyone is where he or she is supposed to be." I didn't have time to dig deeper into the meaning of her words, but I began to notice that people did indeed seem to keep a close eye on one another in this country.

  The others arrived and took their seats around a wooden coffee table in Veronique's government-issued house. Prudence and Agnes looked regal and serious in their long white dresses. Honorata and Annie wore full navy skirts and white T-shirts, and Constance, her brown nun's habit. Prudence had brought with her a wonderful French Canadian woman named Ginette who had recently left a successful corporate career and marriage of more than a decade to seek an entirely new life. She understood how to build operations and systems and she loved management. I knew myself well enough already to know that I could inspire people and help create a dream, but I needed the assistance of a professional manager to build an organization that could sustain our collective vision.

  Once we were all settled, I looked around the room and thought of the life I'd left behind, where women wore "power suits" to work and little black dresses to evening cocktail parties. I remember mornings when, leather briefcase in hand, I had felt a heady rush just walking into Chase Manhattan Bank's massive marble lobby of the bank. And a big part of me missed the 22nd floor at the bank, where I had a specific role and a desk in a skyscraper on Wall Street that was filled with colleague
s who understood me and I, them. Now I was in a Rwandan's living room talking to women in long dresses in a country with which I was still unfamiliar. I didn't fathom then that most big dreams originate in someone's living room with a small group of people, regardless of where they come from or how they are dressed.

  Our meeting began on a formal note as Prudence, our first board chair, called us to order. Veronique, who was always less serious, sat poised at one end of her couch, her wide foot perched on the skinny wooden table, giving her breast to her daughter and wildly waving her hands as she told another story. Yellow sunlight poured through the windows, bouncing off the clean white walls of the tiny house.

  We moved through our agenda: confirming that we would name the organization Duterimbere, because of our own commitment to going forth enthusiastically; officially hiring Ginette; and discussing an action plan. The board designated that Agnes would serve as the organization's first executive director. I thought the appointment was odd since she was a parliamentarian, but Prudence explained that many high-ranking officials held other jobs, as well.

  We all agreed that Agnes would be perfect for the position. She had the necessary status as well as the inclination to do the work. We knew she would give it her all to make Duterimbere succeed and so the board unanimously made her the organization's first executive director. As for staff, Prudence mentioned that she wanted us to meet a young protegee of hers named Liliane, who had recently graduated from university and could be a powerful ally to Ginette as she put operations in order.