Being remarkable is difficult because you often must take small steps rather than rely on huge leaps. Small steps are not for the impatient, though.
Try to imagine a group of twenty women in Rwanda. They were single mothers, all of them poor, all of them living at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Some people called them prostitutes as a way of dismissing them, making them even more invisible in a society filled with invisible women. These twenty women, though, were trying to get out from under. They had all joined a program that was focused on empowering single mothers.
These twenty women were working as employees for an organization trying to find single mothers some kind of “income-generating opportunity” (the catchphrase in Africa for anything people can think of to increase women’s income). Problem was, most of the UN development workers didn’t know how to run a business and, if they were really honest with themselves, many of them had little faith that these twenty women (and others like them) could do anything productive. These women were stuck, dependent on the old charity model, which, despite the best of intentions, kept them in poverty.
The group wore distinctive green gingham smock dresses and met each day in a uniquely depressing little house in a popular quarter of Kigali. The area was called Nyamirambo and it consisted of a main street with small homes painted in Candy Land colors, most of them serving as business too—tailors, shoemakers, radio repair shops, and not much else. From this main, paved road, lots of dirt roads wound back into the hills, where most of the people in the capital city of Kigali actually lived.
Each morning, the women would make their goods (in essence, they took dough and made it into different shapes and fried it.) They made doughnuts, just doughnuts, but in lots of different shapes.
As luck would have it, the women’s group was run by a dynamo named Prisca. Prisca abhorred the dependence on charity and handouts that kept her group stuck, but didn’t know how to change the model. She was a good bookkeeper, meticulously recording all of the costs incurred and income earned by the bakery and tallying weekly results. Two things were striking. Each woman earned the same amount – fifty cents a day - regardless of how many doughnuts she sold. At the same time, weekly losses had been increasing consistently for at least a year. On average, the bakery grossed about $100 a day among the twenty saleswomen. Monthly losses average about $625.
How did the bakery survive? Another part of the women’s group sewed and rented bridal gowns and this helped cover some of the losses, but mostly they depended on support from the local Catholic charity. Prisca knew that this couldn’t last forever: Sooner or later, the nuns would get tired of keeping the support going just to employ two dozen people at half the minimum wage.
Prisca decided that good intentions weren’t helping anyone. Her goal became the same as that of any business: Increase sales and cut costs. To increase sales we (yes, “we.” I was there. And this is my story too) persuade Consolata, a tall, elegant woman of few words, to increase her sales effort. She visits at least five embassies and most of the UN agencies. Unicef promised to order baked goods every day. Though their office was not in the center of town, Consolata promised to send a woman with goods each day at midmorning.
On the first day of embracing the new mind-set, the group nearly doubled the places to which the women generally go to solicit business. We’re on our way.
The next morning at the bakery, the women work behind the little house, squatting on their heels, cooking in a traditional wok-like pot over an open fire. They gossip to one another, crating a lovely melody to accompany the hot oil crackling as the lumps of dough are put into the pan. By eight o’clock, other members of the group arrive to clean, help with cooking, and organize the freshly made goods into individual buckets. Each woman is responsible for taking what she can sell and then returning the leftovers, though no system exists to track inventory, By nine or so, most of the twenty women have taken a crowded minibus into town, holding bright orange buckets and big thermoses of tea on their laps.
We talk about marketing and pitching sales and finding new places to expand markets and reach more customers. I suggest that we turn the house that we use into a standing bakery where people in Nyamirambo can stop by and purchase a sambusa and have a cup of tea. They like the idea but don’t know how we’ll do it.
We try to role-play. Gaudence, always so gloomy, wants to be the person who remains at the bakery, so she is first to volunteer. We talk about eye contact, inviting the customer to see the products, letting him know the prices. Gaudence looks uncomfortable and the other women laugh.
“Okay,” I say, “let’s put someone else on the spot. Consolata, I’m sitting next to you on the minibus, feeling hungry. Can you sell me something before I get off the bus?”
The room roars with laughter at the thought. “No,” she says, “that is too difficulty.”
“Why?” I ask.
“Because women do not just ask strangers to buy things on buses.”
“Why not?”
They cannot stop laughing now. “Because that is not polite.”
I drop it. For now.
We return to our class on who the customer is, how to market, and how to look at a customer and convince her to buy something. The more animated I become, the harder the women laugh. “Okay,” I ask, “what is going on?”
Prisca, always ready to be frank answers. “You are so American. Here, women won’t look someone in the eye, won’t talk to someone they don’t know. It is like that here, you have to accept it.”
“Okay, let me show you,” I say. I take a bucket into the street outside and start talking to people as they pass me. In no time, I sell ten doughnuts, more than some of the women sold all day. “Look,” I say, “it is easy if you market.”
I can feel Prisca looking at me as the women talk among themselves. She laughs, telling me that the women think that no one will say no to an American selling them things on the streets of Nyamirambo. There is too much novelty in that. But no one even wants to look at a poor woman selling snacks out of a bucket.
The attributes of entrepreneurship--risk taking, innovation, vision—are both cultural and learned. Rwanda’s culture leaves little room for individualism or innovation. This is not a trading society, not a place that values rapid change. The women at the bakery simply desire to bring their goods to the offices and collect their meager pay to bring home to their families.
I refuse to accept this. We run competitions for the women to see who can sell the most, but no one will participate. We hold training sessions on how to treat customers, but the response is tepid, at best. We give pep talks every Friday and explain our vision, jut in case someone forgot it, but no one can understand my French.
We then introduce a more transparent accounting system. We make pay completely contingent on what is sold and how costs are controlled, so that the success of this venture really does become the responsibility of the women who, in essence, own the bakery.
In the following weeks, we start making real progress. I have gained respect form the women with this new toughness and clarity. We all know the rules now and finally, the plan seems to be working. Sales skyrocket and we gain new customers weekly. At the same time, we know that in a small city like Kigali, our base of customers is fairly limited. So we decide to do two things. First, we will finally make the little building itself a real bakery where people from the neighborhood can come to buy. Then we make a commitment to expand and sell other goods that people might want to eat. In the end, it is all the same—cash in, cash out, knowing the market, expanding where you can, and delivering quality.
Despite some bumps, within six months we have cornered the snack market in Kigali, expanding from our repertoire of fried dough in a variety of shapes to making cassava chips, banana chips, and peanut butter. We buy plastic containers from the local honey factory for the peanut butter and people came from all over to buy it. We even venture into sorghum bread and hit it big with the Europeans in town. The women are now earning four times the daily minimum wage and there is no stopping us.
And every one of those women became remarkable within her own right. They could choose to say no, they could choose to say yes, they could make their own decisions. They could believe in who they were and have a much greater say in who they wanted to be. Which, at the end of the day, is what we all want, rich or poor, from the United States or from a little corner of Rwanda.
Source: The Big Moo, The Group of 33, Edited by Seth Godin, 2005.