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

by Jacqueline Novogratz

  I thought of the word prostitute and the distancing power of language. Women with no money and few options are too easily categorized as throwaways. The poorest women in Africa often raise children while their husbands work in other places-if they even have husbands-and their poverty sometimes causes them to sleep with a landlord when they can't afford the rent. It is an act driven not by commerce but by the need for survival in a cruel market. Whether or not any of the women in this project ever did this was not a concern of mine. I was infuriated by the license people felt to brand women who, though incredibly disadvantaged, shared the dreams of everyone else.

  After I introduced myself, the women shyly revealed their names: Marie-Rose, Gaudence, Josepha, Immaculata, Consolata-names that reminded me of doilies and lace, not business. There was gentleness in the way each responded, and I wanted to find some way to be of service.

  I could see that the sewing project was going nowhere, especially with the country's burgeoning secondhand clothing business. I asked Prisca to help me understand the baked goods project. First, she gave me a tour of the little two-room building where the project was housed. In the back room, an electric oven stood alone, flanked only by a table and a waffle iron. Outside, several pots filled with samosas shimmying in oil sat on handmade stoves. The women were preparing a snack for us, though we'd come with no money and no promises.

  I asked Prisca how the project operated. "It's simple," she said. "Each morning, several women come very early to prepare the day's selection. It is always the same, but the people like that."

  I would come to know that selection better than I ever wanted to: beignets (fried lumps of dough), batonnets (the same dough molded into sticks and fried), samosas, tiny waffles, and hot tea with milk and sugar. The women would take the goods to the government offices in the middle of the morning and sell them for 10 francs each. They'd then come back with whatever cash they'd earned and give it to Prisca, saving whatever food wasn't sold for the next day.

  In concept, I liked the idea. I knew from my own experience at UNICEF that people would get very hungry by 10:30 or 11:00 in the morning because everyone arrived at work at 7:30 and didn't have a break until lunchtime. There were no little stores selling snack foods on the corners, and people rarely brought treats from home. The problem with the "project mentality" was that the quality of the goods was mediocre, and there didn't seem to be a system for deliveries.

  "How can I be of help?" I asked.

  Prisca answered, "The women are too poor. They earn too little money. They work every day, but the project is losing money every week."

  Honorata nodded in agreement.

  "How much do the women earn?" I asked.

  "Fifty francs a day," Prisca responded-50(. "And most are raising multiple children."

  "How much do you lose?"

  Prisca took out the big green ledger in which she carefully recorded every franc spent, earned, and paid to the women. On average, the project was losing about $650 a month.

  "Who covers the losses?" I asked.

  "Two charities," Prisca said. "But I don't know how long they will renew our funding."

  "They shouldn't renew it," I wanted to say but held my tongue. Six hundred and fifty dollars a month in charity to keep 20 women earning 504 a day. You could triple their incomes if you just gave them the money. It was a perfect illustration of why traditional charity too often fails: In this case, well-intentioned people gave poor women something "nice" to do, such as making cookies or crafts, and subsidized the project until there was no more money left, then moved on to a new idea. This is a no-fail way to keep already poor people mired in poverty.

  I wondered aloud why the charities didn't get tired of keeping the enterprise going just to employ a group of women for so little income. How would this survive in the long term? How would the women ever really change their circumstances?

  Prisca shrugged. "People get by."

  "Prisca, that's not enough," I said.

  "No," she said, visibly embarrassed, "it isn't."

  I was foolish to start with criticism. This is where so many Westerners fail: After a quick appraisal, we're ready to tell people in low-income communities not only what's wrong with what they're doing, but also just how to fix it.

  I apologized and tried again: "Could you be selling more? Could you cut costs?"

  They already had, Prisca explained. "It is easier to find more people to buy than to cut costs." She looked at me as if the ball was now in my court.

  I thought for a moment. "I'll make a deal with you," I said slowly. "If we drop the charity and run this as a business, I'll help make it work." I held out my hand. "Are you okay with this?"

  Prisca lifted her left eyebrow in surprise. When she took my hand, she emphatically responded "Sana," meaning "very much" in Swahili.

  Our goals would be those of any business: to increase sales and cut costs. We'd start tomorrow, and we'd turn this project into a real enterprise with profits and losses.

  As Honorata and I climbed into the jeep, I looked at her and laughed. "Who would have thought that I, who cannot cook to save my life, would end up helping a group of women with a bakery in Nyamirambo? Honorata, do you think the women will be up to the task of running this as a business instead of a charity project? Do you think I'll be able to teach them to sell? I mean, the women themselves hardly said a word, mostly looking at the floor while I spoke. I don't think this is going to be easy."

  She looked at me with an impish smile. "Maybe the good Lord wants to teach you something, too."

  I started early the next morning. The women greeted me warmly, smiling broadly. Without a common language, we communicated through gestures and sprinkled words of French or Swahili. While the women prepared for the morning, I reviewed the books more thoroughly than I had the previous afternoon. The bakery had a long way to go, but the feeling of starting something that might change people's lives invigorated me. The world had written off this little group, yet they had a chance to do something important for themselves, and in doing so, maybe they would change perceptions of what the poorest women are capable of accomplishing.

  Because we started with 20 women, it made sense to expand our revenues quickly to cover costs. Rather than convince our few current customers to buy more doughnuts each day, we needed to increase the number of people we served. And at that time in Kigali, the only way I could think of achieving this was to go door-to-door, targeting agencies and institutions with enough employees to make it worth our while to visit.

  I asked Prisca to translate for me: "Who will volunteer to come with me and speak with ambassadors and agency directors in town to see if they will offer our bakery services to their employees?" Twenty faces all turned downward.

  "Don't worry," I said. "I'll do the talking, but you need to learn to market, and it will be fun."

  No movement.

  Consolata, a tall, thin woman whose long face reminded me of a Giacometti painting despite the wide gap between her teeth, made the mistake of glancing up before the others did. I chose her to be my partner. The other women laughed and clapped to think of their shy friend knocking on office doors in Kigali.

  Consolata was an elegant woman of few words who always wore a jean jacket over her gingham dress. She sat next to me in the backseat of the UNICEF jeep as Boniface chatted in French up front. Consolata could only understand when I stopped him to ask him to translate.

  "What do you normally say to people in the offices when you want to sell to them?" I asked her.

  "Normally, I don't say anything," she nearly whispered. Boniface had to ask her to repeat herself before he could translate. "I just walk through the government agencies and everyone knows what I'm carrying, so they call me over." Honorata had convinced the entire Ministry of Family and Social Affairs to allow the women to sell, and it was the project's biggest client.

  We discussed what it takes to find a new customer-how to establish a relationship, build credibility right up front, a
nd provide the potential customer with a sample of the goods. Though Consolata looked at me like I was crazy, she listened to every word.

  We visited five embassies and most of the UN agencies that first long day. Though Consolata said little, we made progress. After the French Embassy agreed to invite the women to their offices the next morning, I gave her a strong hug and, after a moment of shock, she laughed and hugged me back. We arrived at the project in Nyamirambo as the sun was setting, exhausted, both of us content. We had doubled the number of customers-and we had gone well beyond the Rwandan government departments to supply UN agencies and a number of embassies, too. We were in business.

  The next morning, I arose earlier than usual to jog through the misty, leafy suburb of Kiyovu to Nyamirambo, where the world was waking. The equatorial sun had barely risen. Women with baskets of bananas on their heads with their small children beside them walked like shadows in the soft morning light. It took less than half an hour to arrive at the project, where I found the women already hard at work, squatting on their heels, cooking doughnuts in a traditional woklike pot over an open fire while hurling gossip back and forth, producing an enchanting melody to accompany the crackle of hot oil shimmying as the lumps of dough hit the pan.

  By 8:00 a.m., others began arriving to clean, help with cooking, and then organize the freshly made goods into bright orange plastic buckets. Each woman was responsible for taking what she could sell and returning the leftovers. I watched Josepha and the others choose their selections, the orange buckets a lovely contrast to their green gingham dresses. They would pick up a thermos of tea as well, walk into the street, and disappear into a crowded white minibus, juggling their wares on their laps as best they could. For at least some, the new day took courage, for they were going to embassies and other places where they'd never been before.

  Sales jumped in the first week, but not as much as they should have. Something was wrong with our inventory accounting. We just didn't make enough money at the end of the day in relation to what had been prepared in the morning. When the women returned their buckets and gave us the cash they'd earned, Prisca and I couldn't account for more than a third of the goods produced. My heart sank with the knowledge that the women were stealing. We were putting so much goodwill and trust into this-into them. Didn't they owe us some level of appreciation or accountability?

  Apparently not from their perspective. For example, one woman had told us she'd sold 10 products, but by our calculations, she had taken 23. She was either eating a lot of greasy doughnuts herself or selling them and keeping the money. I was crushed; Prisca was more sanguine, reminding me that Consolata, Gaudence, and a number of other women were being completely honest.

  I tried not to take it personally, though I knew the women were testing my mettle. We couldn't count on their being honest out of appreciation alone-they'd seen too many like me come and go. The bigger question was how to fix the immediate problem and then create the right incentives for the business to sustain itself long after I'd left.

  The existing bookkeeping system had been built entirely on trust and lacked any checks and balances for accountability. No one had noted how many goods each woman took in the morning, making it impossible to calculate whether they were returning the right combination of cash and unsold goods in the afternoon. As it turned out, some of the women were simply keeping the money they collected, not thinking about the consequences. I realized that some women didn't take the system seriously because they didn't see us taking it seriously.

  I had seen this dynamic play out already with some of the borrowers at Duterimbere. The women were testing us, and this time I knew what we had to do in order to show them that we cared.

  Prisca and I stayed up late crafting a simple system that would ensure accountability and reward individual behavior as well as group success. In the morning, we delivered a stern talk about high expectations and how we were all in this together. If there were profits, everyone would share in them. If there were losses, everyone's pay would be reduced, accordingly. The women would be paid a base wage and then earn a commission on total individual sales. The success of this venture would become the responsibility of the women themselves.

  I was becoming clearer in setting expectations; more importantly, the women began treating me with a greater degree of respect. Human beings establish rules of interaction early in almost all relationships, and we still had work to do in breaking the charitable project mentality and turning this into a business.

  Every Friday we gathered as a group in the front room of the project's building for a combination of Business 101 and a pep talk. Often I would ask the women to role-play with me. One week, I volunteered Gaudence, the gloomiest of the group, to be the saleswoman. Gaudence had closecropped hair and the droopiest eyes I'd ever seen. Making her smile became one of my goals. While I didn't exactly see her as the group's natural extrovert, no one else came to mind, either.

  "Okay," I said in French, always with Prisca translating for me. "I'm from the neighborhood and I smell samosas cooking, so I come inside. What do you do?"

  Gaudence looked down, holding her hands behind her back. She stood still and said nothing.

  I took a deep breath.

  "Let's talk about eye contact," I continued. After discussing the basics of making customers feel welcome, I tried role-playing again and got little response. Gaudence was miserable. The women howled with laughter.

  I decided to try again with someone else. "Consolata, I'm sitting next to you on the minibus, feeling hungry. Can you sell me something before I get off the bus?"

  When Prisca translated, the room erupted with giggles that flowed like just-opened champagne.

  Consolata just shook her head and mumbled.

  Prisca smiled her oh-poor-you-who-have-so-much-to-learn smile.

  "Why?" I asked.

  Prisca didn't wait for the women to respond. "Because women do not just ask strangers to buy things on buses," she said with an air of exasperation.

  "Why not?"

  The women burst out laughing all over again. They tried to be formal, but this was too much fun-for them.

  Prisca explained, "Because it is not polite."

  Not polite: a perfect euphemism for "it is not done here." In other words, women who saw themselves on the lowest rung of society's ladder would never have the confidence to interrupt someone on a bus to try to sell him something. It just wasn't done here, and the women knew it. Though I understood the custom, I wanted to push the issue to see if I could instill greater confidence in these women who had such potential for growth.

  We returned to our class on customer relations and building a market where everyone knew our goods and wanted to buy from us. The more animated I became, the harder the women laughed.

  Seeing that I was not attuned to the women, Prisca said kindly, softly, "Jacqueline, you are so American. Here, women won't look someone in the eye, won't talk to someone they don't know. You have to accept it, for that is how things are done."

  "I know that, Prisca, I really do," I said, exasperated. "I just want to give the women a fighting chance. I have never unquestioningly accepted the status quo, so why should we do that here in Rwanda, where change can be a good thing? It isn't like I'm asking the women to do something wrong. I'm just trying to nudge them a bit to think about how we might turn our project into a real bakery, with real incomes for all of them. That means getting a little bit uncomfortable, but we don't have to break all sorts of customs."

  "I understand you," Prisca said, "but change is slow here. You have to give the women time."

  "Measuring success through our profits can be a great incentive for change, Prisca," I said.

  She just looked at me and shook her head kindly.

  "Okay, just watch this," I said. Grabbing an orange bucket filled with little doughnuts and waffles and samosas, I marched up the stairs to the sunlit street. Standing out front, I talked to the people passing by and in no time sold 10 doughnuts, mor
e than some women had sold all day. Then I turned around with a flourish, marched into the room, and took a bow.

  The women clapped and chortled, waving their hands in the air. In contrast, Prisca held her face in her hands and shook her head again. "Jacqueline, no one will say no to a tall American girl selling them things on the streets of Nyamirambo!"

  Finally conceding defeat, I decided to save lesson two for another day.

  But I would not acquiesce. To try and increase sales, I ran competitions for the women to see who could sell the most (no one would participate). I held training sessions on how to treat customers (the response was tepid at best). I continued the pep talks every Friday and reminded the women that we were going to create a real bakery and not just a project, that we would bring quality snacks to people all over Kigali. Prisca would translate and the women would smile patiently, and though I wasn't always sure they understood what I was saying, sales began to improve. Finally, something was working.

  Within several months, the project was profitable. The women were coming to work on time and, though they still weren't enthusiastic salespeople, they were becoming known around Kigali for their bright orange buckets and affordable snacks. More and more institutions signed up for deliveries, and the women began to see-for the first time in their lives-a real correlation between the effort they put into their work and the income they earned. They began to believe the organization could succeed and that they themselves would play a key part in that success.

  Still, for every two steps forward, there was often one back. One afternoon, I received a call from a friend who had expected the women to deliver an order of goods for a party; nothing had arrived. I called Prisca. She informed me that none of the women on duty had shown up. This was in the age before cell phones, so it took a while to track down Consolata, Josepha, and the others. Finally, we learned they'd all gone to the funeral of a friend, thinking the order for baked goods could wait.