When you assume, you make an…

Having spent the vast majority of my life in the US and now living here in Burkina Faso, I realize how much I’ve taken for granted. Indoor plumbing. The Food & Drug Administration. Public transportation. NPR. Big-box retail stores. These are all hallmarks of development but clearly not essential to living and breathing. They are also things that I did not expect to find in Burkina Faso and was thusly contented by doing without for two years. However, something that I did take for granted in the US is not something that can be assumed here. I’ll illustrate with this point with an anecdote:

Some of you may recall that I worked in a group of fellow SED volunteers with my Ouahigouya host mother’s hair salon to develop a new product a few months back. Part of the assignment was to assess her business in general and proffer suggestions to improve operations. She mentioned that stock-outs and having enough money to make regular tax payments were particularly burdensome areas for her. We found out that she did not keep any sales or accounting records, so I set about the task of devising a relatively simple accounting system for her. The records included a very simple ledger with columns for debits and credits and a monthly summary ledger. At the bottom of the monthly summary ledger I included the following questions for her to reflect upon while scrutinizing the numbers, with the hopes that these questions would prompt her to think at a macro-level about managing her business.

-Est-ce que des prix sont assez pour couvrir les frais et le coût de main-œuvre? (Are the prices high enough to cover the costs of materials and the labor?)

-Pour éviter d'être en rupture de stock, quand est-ce qu'il faut s'en approvisionner, et combien de fois par mois? (In order to avoid stock-outs, when should I restock and how often during the month?)

-Est-ce qu'il y a des tendances par rapport aux clients, aux modes, aux frais? (Are there trends with respect to clients, styles, costs ?)

-S'il y a des tendances, comment est-ce que on peut en tirer profit? (If there are trends, how can I take advantage of them?)

-Qui sont les meilleurs clients? Comment est-ce qu'on peut les mieux servir? (Who are the most loyal clients? How can I best serve them?)

I realize these questions may seem pretty obvious to Western minds, but truthfully many Burkinabé entrepreneurs do not take such issues into consideration, particularly at the small and micro business level. For example, sometimes they do not factor labor into the price of a product or service since they don’t consider time to be valuable. I spent an hour proudly presenting my ledger sheets to my host mother one night, using one of the children to translate (she doesn’t speak French and I can’t speak Mooré. She seemed to nod contemplatively throughout the presentation and at the end she said that she was grateful and that she thought this would be a useful system for her. Later that night I saw her scrutinizing the sheets, a sight that thrilled me and caused my little heart to nearly burst with pride.

As instructed many times over during training, my group dutifully paid a follow-up to the hair salon to see how the sales of the hair gel were going and assess the helpfulness of the accounting ledgers. As usual, we had to pull one of the children in to the hair salon to translate into Mooré. The hair gel sales were brisk, which we were relieved to discover. I pressed about the ledgers. Her daughter advised, “She hasn’t completed the sheets because she can’t write.” It took me about a minute to process this concept. She can’t write? I should have been tipped off to this by her inability to speak French, since people here learn French at school. I was a bit flummoxed and didn’t know how to respond, so I just left it at that and we wrapped up the meeting.

So, to my earlier point, one of the differences between the US and Burkina that I didn’t erstwhile consider was the scope of literacy. I wasn’t expecting illiteracy to be as widespread as it is here. I’d read about the literacy rate in Burkina prior to coming, but those statistics were lost in a sea of other statistics that all coalesced into a fuzzy picture that is only now starting to sharpen a little bit more each day. I can’t seem to get out of this Westernized mindset whereby questioning someone’s ability to read and write is a personal affront, offensive and vulgar in nature. My presumption that everyone is literate has already been problematic for me, as evinced by the anecdote above. However, there also exists a tangential aspect that I actually never considered. Please allow me to illustrate again through another story:

Back in Ouahigouya, the same group above and I were paired with a women’s Savings & Credit Club and were given similar instructions: help them improve their operations. Savings & Credit Clubs, called Tontines in French, are a major initiative of the SED program in Burkina, since these clubs allow access to credit without the bureaucracy of a bank and paperwork (see: Micro-credit). We engaged the women in a discussion about the aspects of their tontine and found out that they used weekly contributions from each member to form a pool from which loans were distributed. Loan recipients were to use these funds as start-up capital for petit commerce, such as selling little cakes by the side of the road. The tontine wanted to help the loan recipients better manage their money, so the following week the group returned, with translator in tow, and gave a presentation with our suggestions on how to better manage money. The part of the presentation I gave was entitled, “Determining a Business Idea’s Potential for Profitability.” I talked about why it was important to include a margin above the costs of materials and labor into prices, how to set prices high enough but not so high as to alienate customers, a simple calculation on how to determine if one has made a profit, and the warning to gauge all of these factors in advance of venturing into the business, all the while using little cake sales as an example. I also had a flipchart showing the profit calculation. The women were largely silent and had no questions. The group moved on to the next part of the presentation, which was the example accounting ledger. There was a lot of Mooré chatter after the translation was performed, with the help of the tontine’s President, the sole woman who spoke both French and Mooré. Our translator explained that the President told the women that they could use the ledger even if they don’t know how to use numbers, that they could make a circle for 25 CFA, an X for 50 CFA, etc., as long as they could remember which symbols represented which amounts. I was again taken aback, as I could not understand how it was possible for someone to be able to engage in financial transactions without knowing numbers. But it did help explain why no one had any questions about the profit calculation flipchart.

Innumeracy and illiteracy are problems that arise from not attending school. Those who don’t attend school tend to be women, since young girls have many household responsibilities beginning from a young age and, after a certain grade level, school is no longer paid for by the state (thus, the value proposition of keeping girls in school unfortunately becomes low or non-existent). While this problem is one that is lessening, it still remains serious enough that a quarter of the Peace Corps volunteers here concentrate on Girls’ Empowerment and Education exclusively. Coming to terms with these conditions has made me rethink my entire approach to business training and interacting with people in general. I have resolved to become more comfortable with asking people if they’ve been to school instead of shying away from the topic, since the answer could radically change the tone and way in which we work together... and hopefully lead to more effectual results.