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

by Jacqueline Novogratz

  "How much is the basket?" I asked the first woman.

  "A thousand francs," she replied-$10 at the time.

  "That is too expensive," I replied and gave her a knowing look.

  Then I added, "The going rate for these baskets is closer to 600 francs ($6). I can't pay 1,000 ($10)."

  She stared at me. Her friend said nothing.

  I let a moment pass in silence, hoping they would jump in with entrepreneurial flair and start bargaining. They didn't.

  "Can you give me a better price?" I asked.

  No, she said. "The cost is 1,000 francs."

  "How much is your basket?" I asked the other woman politely, trying to spur competition with the neighbor.

  "A thousand Rwandan francs," she responded.

  Remaining focused on the second woman, I said, "You know and I know that you have nearly doubled the price of the basket. I live near a store in the city that sells these exact baskets for 600 francs, not 1,000. I don't have to buy the basket today. But I like you, so I will pay you 800 francs for your basket."

  "No," she said, eyes downcast. "The price is fixed. It must be 1,000 francs."

  I felt frustration rising because they weren't playing my game. I was willing to pay a 30 percent premium to test the market. There were no other customers anywhere in sight, and yet neither woman showed an interest in bargaining. We talked for a long time, haggling over the price and making each other laugh when no one budged.

  Finally, I summarized our situation: "Okay. You each have one basket to sell, and you refuse to compete against one another. I am willing to pay much more than anyone else today, so one of you could sell me the basket and then split the earnings. There are many solutions."

  The women shook their heads in unison. Finally, the first woman looked into my eyes intently. "You see," she said, "I will not take a sale away from my sister. We will not change prices so that one of us gets the sale. And I cannot change the price because this basket is all I have to sell. I need to take the bus home and pay school fees for my children. I cannot bring home a basket but must be able to cover the costs. So I will sell the basket for the price I need."

  Here was a new logic, one based on scarcity and hope, however unjustified. After all, I was still standing there and clearly wanted the basket. So as long as I was still in the game, there was a chance they would get their price.

  Markets are about finding willing sellers and buyers. But we often don't know the incentives and constraints within which people are operating.

  I tried to wait it out. Boniface and I threw glances back and forth. He obviously wanted me to go without buying the baskets because he didn't want me to look stupid, like a tourist.

  I knew I would never really make my point, at least not that day. I knew that giving them the money would reinforce their strategy, but I also knew I couldn't come back each day to help strengthen their businesses. The women wanted to go home but would stay all night at the market if they had a chance of getting the extra RWF 400-probably more than a week of take-home pay. The RWF 400 or $4 would mean a lot more to them than it did to me. Given that I was neither teaching nor proving anything in this standoff, I gave each woman 1,000 francs.

  Back in the car, Boniface told me that the women had taken me for a fool.

  "Sometimes you have to be a fool, or else your heart can turn to stone," I muttered, not having a better answer.

  "If I were coming back to that market, I wouldn't have done that," I shared my reasoning. "But we're not coming back, and if I didn't buy the baskets, they wouldn't have had the money to go home. Sometimes it's okay for all of us to win little victories in life. I can afford the loss of 400 francs-and," I grinned, "the loss of ego in front of you."

  Boniface shook his head, unconvinced. "You paid too much for the baskets."

  I looked at him. "My friend," I said, "you better just promise me not to tell a soul, or I will lose my reputation for toughness."

  He laughed so hard, for so long, that he had to wipe away the tears. "I am telling everyone in Kigali. Or else you can give me 1,000 francs and I can give you a very nice basket that I buy for 600."

  "Promise me ...... I laughed back.

  He just shook his head, turned the key, and started driving.

  Daily life revolved around money, from tiny amounts to more serious cash. In our first year of operation, Duterimbere's total budget was less than $50,000. In our second year, our budget quadrupled. After doing the nutrition workshops, Agnes and Prudence accepted money to do food-processing workshops and to expand into rural areas, though we were not ready. Our management processes were still too weak. Ginette feared the fattening budget, with neither enough managers nor robust systems to support it. We spoke to Prudence, who always listened, and we agreed to slow down operations until we could train more good people-a major task given that we now had branches in other parts of the country.

  As often happens when nonprofit leaders become visible, Prudence and Agnes began attending international conferences to spread the word that Rwandan women were helping themselves through their entrepreneurial efforts. Liliane and Ginette stayed at home, trying to run the operations and teach women the basics of lending and business. Each day seemed to teach us more about what we didn't know than about what we did. But we were making progress.

  For months, we worked with a woman to come to understand her maize-milling business and get her ready for a loan. She'd been borrowing from the moneylender at 10 percent daily to sell grain and wanted to upgrade her business and her life. Before the final signing of the loan documents, she told Liliane she first needed to talk to the minister of her Seventh-Day Adventist church.

  The next day, the woman approached Liliane in tears. "Usury is forbidden in the church," she said, "and so I cannot accept the loan." No matter what Liliane said, the woman refused to acknowledge that she was paying more than five times as much to borrow money from the moneylenders and would never be able to run a sustainable business that way. The difference was simply that they didn't charge interest, but rather fees.

  I went personally to see the woman's minister, trying to suppress my rage. No matter what I argued, he would not be moved. "You are trying to change our women," he finally told me, something I'd heard many times by then.

  "I am working with Rwandan women who are trying to change the conditions in which they live," I answered.

  "You cannot charge usurious rates" was his response.

  I got nowhere. Working in Rwanda meant interacting with churches in some capacity. On one hand, they provided a great sense of hope and faith to people in need of a belief in a better future-even if it was in another life. On the other, because of the enormous power they yielded, some individual religious leaders could impose their own notions of what was right on others. Our focus became learning how to navigate political institutions and work with the best individuals inside of them, the churches included.

  Other frustrations came from the good intentions of international agencies. One agency offered us the opportunity to send a group of rural women to India to learn about entrepreneurship and opportunities there.

  "Rural women?" I asked. "Who thought of this one? Poor Rwandan women speak not a word of English, let alone French. They've not traveled more than 20 miles beyond their homes, and they want them to cross the Indian Ocean? And for what? Why not send the parliamentarians, who can represent Rwanda, interact with all kinds of Indians, and bring back lessons learned?"

  But once again, the donors controlled the money and the idea.

  Agnes and Prudence thought the trip would broaden the women's visions and bring recognition to Duterimbere internationally. I didn't think we'd done anything yet to deserve such recognition. The institution was less than 2 years old. We needed to focus on what we were doing, not send poor rural women around the world.

  Liliane agreed with me. "These are women who have never been to the capital," she said. "And your Americans want to send them to India. Wouldn't the money
be better spent building a school so that they could learn to read?"

  I concurred, but we lost the argument. Liliane was designated the leader of the trip.

  She returned a week after leaving, exhausted, and explained to Ginette and me, "We arrived in New Delhi to hot, suffocating air and too many people. The women couldn't understand English. Our translator would try to speak to me in French, and then I would translate to Kinyarwanda. It took a long time, and no one really ever understood what was happening. We visited a group of farmers, and it was exciting to see interaction among the women, though again, no one understood what anyone else was saying. That night one of our women fell very sick. It turned out to be malaria. She hadn't wanted to tell anyone about it because she was afraid to ruin the trip. By the time we recognized the disease, she was too sick. We rushed her to the hospital, but after 2 days she died. The other women refused to do anything while they waited for her. They decided the trip had been cursed. I couldn't argue with so many crying women, so we came home."

  We were stunned, even if there was a hint of "we told you so" in our minds. Ginette promised to meet with the women to talk about what had happened and to try to glean some lessons from the experience. She would first wait a few days so the women could at least recover slightly from the trauma.

  Visibly shaken, Liliane told us over and over how sorry she was for not completing the trip, despite our attempts to tell her she'd done exactly the right thing. Still, she had loved meeting the Indian people and longed to travel to other places. She reached into her bag and gave each of us a necklace-a dainty one to suit Ginette's style and a big silver one that fit me perfectly. How Liliane had time to think about us in the midst of chaos was beyond me.

  Everyday life got better. We hired more staff and made more loans. Almost everyone was repaying, and Duterimbere was becoming known across the country. Prudence, Agnes, and other founding board members worked long into the nights approving loan applications and reviewing progress. The level of seriousness-and of contribution-was thrilling. This was what I'd imagined development could be.

  One of the lessons of start-ups, though, is that whenever you think things are going well, something happens to hand you back your humility. Given our rate of growth, Ginette had hired accountants to review our books and strengthen our financial systems. After about a week, the accountants walked into her office with serious faces, telling her they needed to talk privately.

  There was a problem. In the next days, they discovered more than $3,000 in missing funds and a number of exaggerated and forged receipts. All signs pointed to Agnes.

  Agnes had signing authority for all funds with the banks and was responsible for all expenses. When approached about the missing money, she seemed genuinely flabbergasted, and dismayed.

  "How can I help find the criminal who did this?" she asked indignantly.

  Prudence called an emergency board meeting, to which Agnes was not invited. That night nervous tension and anxiety crackled in the secondfloor room. What would we say to the donors? Who would fund the organization again? Prudence reminded us that while these were difficult problems, none was more complex than dealing correctly with Agnes, who was one of the most respected women in the country.

  With Prudence's leadership and, in essence, permission, we decided that we would never know who actually stole the money, but that Agnes, as director, must be held accountable, at least internally. We would tell the outside world that she was leaving because her duties as parliamentarian and legal expert had become too onerous for her to also run the growing organization. Prudence was asked to give her the news.

  The next afternoon, Prudence asked for her resignation. Agnes was indignant. As director, she could use the money as she saw fit, she claimed. Prudence suggested that the work was too burdensome for a parliamentarian; this became the official story. A piece of ice formed between Prudence and Agnes that would never melt.

  In the year after Agnes resigned, she and I remained on good terms. We both pretended that nothing had ever happened. She was still an advocate for women and remained friendly with most of the leaders at the helm of Duterimbere. I was slightly stunned by the fact that we'd lost two of the three parliamentarians who had first established the organization, one to a probable murder and the other to corruption. But I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about it. I was much too busy getting on with getting on.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE BLUE BAKERY

  "Poverty won't allow him to lift up his head; dignity won't allow him to bow it down."

  -MADAGASY PROVERB

  n meeting women in and around the markets of Kigali, we rarely found a business that employed more than one woman and maybe one or two of her youngsters. I wanted to know what it would take to build a business that actually created jobs for poor people. There had to be something more than selling tomatoes or rice or baskets; besides, I wanted to see for myself what it would take to make a business work in Rwanda. I started asking around to see if anyone could point me to a business with more than a few workers.

  Honorata, the shy woman who worked with Veronique, told me about a project she'd helped create for single mothers in Nyamirambo, the popular section of Kigali where lower-income people lived. When Prudence overheard us, she whispered in my ear that the women were prostitutes. I shrugged but didn't really pay attention, as it seemed to me the word was used too easily in Rwanda. Women who danced late at the same nightclubs I did could easily be labeled wanton or worse. Besides, I was eager to visit any legitimate business with potential for real growth.

  Boniface drove us through the wealthy neighborhood of Kiyovu, down Avenue Paul VI, and into Nyamirambo. The day was hot; the air, heavy; the streets were jammed with cars crawling along, manuevering around potholes. Women walked hand in hand carrying enormous bundles on their heads. Small shops stood one after another, almost always doubling as homes. Kiosks, tailors, hair salons, pharmacies, stores that played videos at night were painted blue, green, yellow, orange, though the paint had worn off over the years and the colors had faded. The unpaved side roads were filled with old auto parts and the burned-out bodies of ancient vehicles. At the top of the hill stood a large mosque painted white with stripes of bright green. It reminded me of a wedding cake, a small oasis rising out of its chaotic surroundings.

  The "kiosk Allah"-a little shop selling sundries-and an Islamic school were located next to the mosque, where the streets divided. Nyamirambo had a sizable Muslim population for a country that was mostly Catholic at the time. Turning right, we passed a tailor shop, a clothing boutique, and a shoe repair store, in front of which stood a 3-foot-long wingtip oxford shoe on a tall stick. Two doors down stood our destination: a singularly unimpressive gray cement building that housed Project AAEFR (Association Africaine pour des Entreprises Feminins du Rwanda).

  "I've worked with them for years," Honorata told me. "The women have such good intentions, and you will like them, I am sure."

  All I could hear was my mother telling me that the path to hell is paved with good intentions. Her moral philosophy was that we show the world who we are through our actions, not merely through words or intentions. The detritus, disasters, and despair unwittingly created by well-intentioned people and institutions across Africa were evidence that my mother was right.

  The group known as the Femmes Settles (or single women, code for unwed mothers) was one of many women's groups organized in part by Honorata and Veronique's Ministry for Family and Social Affairs. The women, among the city's poorest, would gather for training and some form of income generation. This particular group focused on a "baking project," which consisted of making and then selling a few goods in town and sewing dresses and crafts on order. In a moment, it was clear to me that "income generation" was a misnomer. Only one woman was sewing at all; the rest were simply sitting quietly.

  There were about 20 of them in the cramped front room, all identically dressed in green gingham short-sleeved smocks, sitting on two long wooden be
nches in front of a pine counter with empty shelves behind it. There were no baked goods to be seen and no sign advertised what the group did.

  "How long have they been waiting for us?" I whispered to Honorata.

  "I don't know," she responded, "but they are used to waiting for visitors."

  I hated that dynamic: powerless women just sitting, waiting all day if a donor was expected to visit, hoping someone might come in the door with help but feeling powerless to do anything for themselves.

  I looked around at the women appreciatively. Bowing my head slightly, I said hello: Amahuru."

  Faces lit up, and one woman held her hand across an otherwise unfettered smile. In unison, the women responded "Imeza," meaning "fine." When one or two began talking to me in Kinyarwanda, I looked around awkwardly at Honorata and felt great relief when she began to translate. Any small effort to communicate on my part elicited gracious appreciation. Kinyarwanda is complex and difficult, and has what seems like four or five syllables in every word. The women applauded when I used some Swahili, for at least most of the Muslim women spoke that language. Still, I knew my African-language skills were on a child's level at best.

  A solid, affable-looking woman named Prisca, also dressed in the green checkered uniform, stood in front of the group. With smiling eyes, a square jaw, and a wide, open face, she reminded me of my great-aunts who were built like tree trunks, with strong hands that knew hard work and sweat. She took my hand.

  "Welcome," she said. "We're happy you've come to visit." She was hoping I would bring resources, preferably money, but her warmth was genuine.

  While Prisca and I spoke French, the women stared. In Rwanda, children of the elites were taught French from a young age, but the poor learned only Kinyarwanda in primary school. Most of these women had spent only a year or two in school at most and couldn't speak a word of French. They seemed to range in age from 18 to their late twenties and carried themselves with an air of innocence and simplicity, wearing not a speck of makeup, jewelry, nail polish, or revealing clothing. Most women wore flip-flops, and their dresses could have passed for prison attire.