Joaquin Alemany ’11Journal #1
After a long plane journey with a 10-hour stopover at Casablanca, I arrived in Dakar, the capital of Senegal. Three colleagues and a driver picked me up at the airport, and we drove in a 30-year-old car for four and a half hours to Saint Louis, Senegal. We arrived at Saint Louis early in the morning, and the city was just starting to wake up. Men were slowly walking to the mosque for the Morning Prayer while others walked to work, and some women cleaned their homes from dinner the night before.
Papa Demba, the project manager for the young and children workers program, was waiting for us in front of the apartments where we were staying. Because the tenant wasn’t awake yet, we decided to go to the nearby hotel to have breakfast and make introductions. I already knew Papa from the past two years, so for me it was more of an opportunity to catch up with him on what occurred last year. He had an accident and injured his leg, so he was not walking correctly.
Even after years of coming to Saint Louis and sharing many experiences with the Claire Enfance team, it is amazing to me how they are so up-to-date with all events happening in the world. It is a mixture of knowledge of many different events regarding political, social, and technological issues of what is going on in the developed countries, without really having a deep understanding of them. For example, everybody in Senegal is very happy and has a lot of hope on Obama being president of the United States, but almost nobody follows daily US government and politics. People know about BlackBerrys, iPhones, and iPads, but they have ever held one in their hands. This is the consequence of living in a globalized world but yet with huge differences between the different countries.
After breakfast we checked into our apartments and rested a few hours before the program started. The first day we had a meeting with all the beneficiaries of the microcredit program. Maybe here it is worth to do a recess to explain shortly the background of Saint Louis, the organization Claire Enfance, and the Microcredit Program.
The majority of the beneficiaries of the microcredit program are girls. This is because boys at the age of 17 and up are still learning the Koran or trying to find jobs as apprentices of different businesses. To welcome us, they had prepared a meeting with 50 of the beneficiaries of the program, in which everybody was introduced to each other, explaining what they had done in the past and what their microproject was about.
From our side, we explained the purpose of our visit — that we would be conducting interviews with each of them to evaluate the impact of the microcredit program in their lives and to detect possible ways to improve the program. This evaluation will be useful for Fundación Xaley (Xaley means child in Wolof, the Senegalese local language) in order to raise funds showing the positive impact of their programs and also to be able to detect possible failures of the program and be able to act upon them.
Journal #2
Evaluation of the microcredit program
One of my main objectives with the Claire Enfance Team was to evaluate the microcredit program. The program evaluation serves a double objective: first, it gives good visibility so investors can see the success of the program and the positive impact of the money being lent to the Saint Louis population; secondly, it detects possible improvement gaps in the program or areas of growth based on the actual experiences from the beneficiaries.
In order to evaluate the microcredit impact on the beneficiaries, we decided to incorporate as many aspects of the Human Development index as were applicable to the program. The only category that we could not include (for obvious reasons) was health. Below is an overview of the categories we defined:
- The categories were translated into specific questions that we put together into an interview to the beneficiaries, and we have been performing this interview for the past three years. This year, we interviewed about 50 of the program’s beneficiaries, and typically 50 or more children live in a single household where they study the Koran. Many of them don’t speak French and speak only the local language (Wolof) so we needed the translation of the elder beneficiaries with better French skills. More details and the results of the evaluation will come in the next journal entry.
The second objective of my visit was to help the team with the tracking tools that they are currently using. For obvious reasons, international help (donations) requires increasing justifications and detailed information of the work realized by NGOs like Claire Enfance. However, the team faces the challenge of spending its time doing reports and filling databases versus doing their work in the field. This controversy brings cooperation to the difficult trade-off of putting field resources into administrative work in order to get more funds so that more resources can be allocated to work in the field.
In my opinion, the only answer to this problem is to make the administrative work more efficient. There is a lot of room for improvement here. The level of computer readiness that we assume in business school is light years away from what the Claire Enfance team knows. In terms of document processing — and especially database population and analysis — they are far behind from what we expect from a student after a bachelors degree. This is the second year in which I have been working with them in improving their tools.
To give an example, in terms of the health services that Claire Enfance provides for the children of the Koranic schools of Saint Louis (they have two full-time health assistants in the two centers of the NGO), they record each of the children’s visits into a book manually and then translate the book records into an Excel file. This file is very important for them to analyze how many children they support, how many have each disease (to detect possible diseases that are getting extended), or how many children of each Koranic school (Daara in Wolof) got sick in the past month (to detect schools that have poor hygiene conditions and act upon it). Of course with a very basic Excel knowledge this analysis can be done in a few minutes (once the database is populated). However, the health assistants now populate the Excel sheet, but then proceed to do the analysis counting manually from their handwritten ledger. Of course after showing them how to use pivot tables, I could see the light in their eyes.
Journal #3
The evaluation of the Microcredit program
As explained in the previous journal entry, this year we conducted about 50 interviews with the different beneficiaries of the program. Most of the interviews were conducted at the main center, where the oldest girls do the advanced formation in sewing. It was convenient because it is located in the center of the city of Saint Louis and also because the oldest girls, the ones who helped us in the translation during the interviews, spent most of their afternoons there.
Sophie Touré, one of the first beneficiaries of the microcredit program, has a very interesting story. She is 24 now and very smart and prepared. She has a daughter and is divorced, so she lives with her mother and sisters. With the money she earns through her small project of selling clothes, she helps her family and covers the basic education (“maternelle”) for her daughter. In addition to that, Sophie has taken responsibility within the organization, and she is now helping Adja (the microcredit program responsible) to manage all the new applications and helping the prospective beneficiaries to develop their projects. Sophie also participates in other activities from different organizations (children summer camps, etc) to make additional money to her project. During our time in Saint Louis she helped us with the interviews to the other beneficiaries.
After finalizing the interviews, we analyzed the data and found some interesting results:
- Revenues achieved with the projects increase to an average of 40 – 50 euros per month (from 20 – 30 euros of a housekeeper salary). Of course this salary is still very low even for Senegal standards.
- The beneficiaries learned a lot in terms of business management (i.e. open bank accounts, have their accounting system to ensure selling profitably, etc.)
- A few years after receiving the microcredit they are much more independent from their families partly due to the economic independence they have earned.
