Mandazi, reinvented bookkeeping, and The Gates Foundation...all in a day's work!

G’day mates…wow I miss Aussie slang. Anyway! My day today was relatively straightforward! In fact, I might start posting every two days soon, otherwise everything will be too short to talk about!

Today was a relatively standard day, and yes, that includes all of the twists, turns, and cancelled plans of a “relatively standard day” in Tanzania. I woke up and had a shower! The power was a welcome gift today. For the last few days, the power’s already gone out by the time I get up hahahaha (without the power, the shower is icy cold…by which I mean genuinely the coldest shower I’ve ever felt…). After that I got dressed (at which point George got up and had a shower) and went to have breakfast. Today, brekky was “mandazi”. Mandazi are those donut-ey type things I described before…except I have a name for them now! This is what they look like:

After that we headed off to work. We caught the Dala Dala this morning! YESSSSSSSS. It was so good…not having to walk into the sun for half an hour…ugh. Anywayyyy…once we got to the office, we all grabbed seats and started pottering away at our various jobs…………………………….

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I did some Christmas shopping…SHHHHHHH don’t tell anyone…HAHAHAHA nah it’s fine it’s that time of year and everyone’s doing bits and pieces here hahahahha. The human rights team got a call saying that the first group of the day wasn’t going to come in for their meeting, so we all had an extended stay in the office for the morning! Everyone was working on their own stuff while George taught a few women English in the next room over. They sounded like they were having fun so that’s good! Meanwhile, Marjolein and I worked on finalising the drafts of an all-encompassing cash book and stock card system. So, as backstory for this…

Late last week, I realised that the bookkeeping system taught by Projects Abroad, (that I detailed in a previous post) has very limited potential. It’s an excellent system for teaching the women the concept of bookkeeping, and developing good bookkeeping habits. However, once women are onto their 8^th loan or so (usually 800,000Tsh), they have invested heavily in many new resources and their businesses are actually medium sized. For instance, one of the women that we visited last week was on her second last loan (which was 900,000Tsh). Her chicken farm had over 1300 chickens. She supplied chicken and eggs to other shops, as well as a few individual people…but mostly shops. Her business is clearly well-developed. So, it made me wonder about the retail-shop-equivalent of her business. They must have a very difficult time keeping track of all of their transactions and stock! This led me to talking to Elizabeth about whether the development of a more advanced bookkeeping system would be useful, and she said yes! So, I got to work on a draft of a cash journal and stock card system over the weekend! Today it’s all finished. So! After talking to George and Marjolein, who had also been working on stock-recording systems of their own, we discussed the merits of each one for a bit (just before George had to teach his class). Anyway, the long and short of it is, we’re using my cash book draft, with some minor modifications and simplifications of headings and stuff, and we’re using Marjolein’s stock keeping system, which was actually really interesting and very effective. I’ll show you some screenshots, so you can see what they look like!

So, the cash journal is pretty self-explanatory, but the stock card requires a bit of explanation. Each line is a particular product offered by the business (there usually aren’t that many…maybe 60 or so), then there’s the price that was paid for each good, the price that they’re usually sold at, and the number that the business has at the start of the sheet. Across the sheet, each day, the woman writes the number on hand at the start of the day, then keeps a tally (in a scores of 5 type of thing) immediately under that number (in the same cell). Then the next cell across is the next day, and she deducts the tallied amount from the amount on hand at the start of the previous day. It’s really simple, and allows for quick recording of transactions in-between customers.

Elizabeth was beaming when I explained it all to her. Especially when I talked about how in the more advanced groups, the current bookkeeping system can only carry their businesses so far, so this new system of stock-keeping and the cash journal should be taught to them at around the 8^th loan. There are 2 or 3 groups who are actually at that stage right now, so we might teach it to them before I leave!

After that was lunch over at Lenana again. I had chipsi mayai again…ugh it’s such good chipsi mayai there. I got a piece of chapati too…everyone thought I was gonna be so fat…but I didn’t actually want to eat it all! I just wanted to try the chapati here, and also have my chipsi mayai…so it was really good! Don’t worry…I didn’t eat it all hahahaha.

Then that afternoon we headed off to the Ikusura group. Marjolein gave her presentation on saving while I did the collections and marked their bookkeeping, and everyone else headed off to do a business visit. After Elizabeth, Marjolein and I were done, we went and joined the others at the business. It was amazing. This woman had a pretty big plot of land, with her house, some beehives, some livestock, and a woodchopping area. Then, out the back, on another plot of land was this MASSIVE garden. It was on an even bigger block than her house! It was like a jungle, the only difference being that she knew all of the plants in there. There were some various plants with medical uses, some for makeups, some for tea, some for cooking. It was truly amazing. The MOST impressive part however, was that some time recently (I couldn’t quite nail when, but I think it was in the last few weeks), some sort of President of some sort of organic foods thing in Italy…again it was difficult to nail exactly who and when because of the language barrier…but it seemed like it had been a massive deal. She also was a guest speaker at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in July last year, and spoke about development in Africa! So, she seemed like a very influential woman in the area! It was a shame I missed most of the business visit! I would’ve liked to have heard the whole story! But I had to scrape together what I could in about 5 minutes!

After that I headed home. George went to the Central Market to buy some jumpers with the Tanzanian flag on them for him and his family. They seemed a bit on the steep side…22,000Tsh each…but he talked them down to 50,000Tsh for three. So that brings me to now…when not much is happening and I’m listening to some Big Shaq and Bag Raiders while writing this post…HAHAHAHA

Here’s some pictures I took of the Ikusura group while we were waiting for the human rights group to finish their presentation!

That's me, Rachelle, and Yuta

As always, I’ll see ya next time!