Is it just an internship? Like the ones you can see in any kind of job, who help the company and learn the work, preparing for a future career? Or is it a volunteer like PCV who serve the communities with some organizations. Or researcher? I have seen some grad students (PhD or MD) coming here to get data for their research and project. They act quite independently from the organization.
I have been asking this question to myself recently quite a lot. If internship, I can do whatever the organization thinks helpful to itself and requires me to do. If volunteer, I am inclined more to the benefit of community and people in the village, for their sake. If researcher, I focus on getting the information helpful to myself. Well, I don't have to pick only one from them, but I guess I'm more like mixture of internship and volunteer. The reason why I'm asking this question is that I'm not sure about how much ownership I need to have here with projects and improvements here at SACCO.
Only three people have been working in SACCO, and since George stopped showing up for his surgery, the understaffed issue has been worse. When there were three staffs, one cashier, one loan officer, and one manager, it was not bad although George, our poor cashier, had to stay in the front desk for a whole time from 9 (or sometimes 8:30) to 4. I think he doesn't have time for lunch because people keep coming depositing or withdrawing money during the whole time, so he has to wait until there are no people in the front and eat food that he brought from home. Helen sometimes helps George with his work, but she has her own job to keep track of loans (incoming and outgoing ones), visiting loan applicants and check their requirements. Moses, our manager, is doing all the rest of works I guess. He meets with people (not all the customers but mostly important(?) people) and runs the business. Anyway, the point is that there is not much space for these people to work on extra projects with us-actually only Moses is working with us and Helen is focusing on SACCO work: both loan and cashier. They know we are bringing some mzungu power to this bank in addition to some new ideas to improve here, but we still need their opinion and help to develop those ideas into actual projects. We spent one whole semester, brainstorming different kinds of projects that we can pursue during this summer. And we knew that two months is not enough time to bring a change, but I thought it would be enough time to at least discuss and start on some grounds, of course on the assumption that it's easy to put into action with Moses. But it turned out it's not that simple and easy. Here are my conclusion about why it is so difficult and slow to do things here.
First of all, as I said above, Moses is too busy. He has to look after whole SACCO business with help of Helen, which means running this company in addition to sitting at the cashier at the times when Helen is absent for lunch or on-site loan examination. As a result, even though there are some projects that will help SACCO to expand and reach out to more business partners, most of the works have been on us. Of course, doing research online and contacting different fields of people was expected to be our job here because we are more familiar with surfing internet and stuffs, but I guess I expected Moses to be more active and engaged with our projects. But I understand him being already very busy with SACCO works, so I'm not blaming him.
Second, there are definitely different priorities between him and us. His focus is on increasing membership. Our focus is not only on helping SACCO but also on helping the community. Giving them more access to money. This is also goes with the point that I realized a gap between how we think and how he thinks microfinance (or SACCO) should function. Microfinance has been known for a perfect cure for poverty. An unparalleled method to drive away poverty. It has been recognized for its novel idea to give loans for the poor who could not be credited for loans. But here, SACCO is more like a local bank to Moses or other people in the village. By this reason, some projects are pushed to be the last priorities to him.
For example, financial literacy class. Financial illiteracy was one of the problems that the first interns pointed out the need in the town, so the second interns (last year) started the financial literacy class. It was successful and apparently Moses was a good teacher by what people have said. After the first class last summer, there have been two more classes held by Moses himself and decent number of people have participated them. To see how the classes were going, we decided to do some follow-ups on the participants of last classes, but to reach out those people, we definitely need some help from Moses in terms of getting the address (the recorded address of members are mostly just the name of town but no more specific details) and translation. Also, we are planning to have one more class while we are here to make sure we can implement some improvements that were made after follow-up evaluations. Arranging this needs Moses because after all he will be teaching the class and communicating with the people after we are gone. I've been in charge of following-up the participants and holding another class, but I'm still waiting for Moses to get the actual address by calling their phones. We all agreed that it seems like his last priority among the agenda lists because the class means after-work hours and no one welcomes that. Also, the class does not bring much money to compensate for that, so there is weaker business motivation. But the class has been one of the successful projects from last year interns, and we really want this to continue happening. So I will do my best to push this project no matter what. After all, this not only helps people to be sensitized but also raises SACCO's reputation and engagement socially with people.
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