Learning from African Micro-Entrepreneurs
This week, I returned to the U.S. from a trip to Kenya. I spent the last ten days traveling through the Masai Mara, seeing animals like lions, leopards, elephants and rhino, and visiting the beautiful and ancient beach island of Lamu. I also spent some time meeting with women entrepreneurs involved in microfinance and offering them advice on how to improve the efficiency of their lending and borrowing practices. What I didn’t count on was that I learned as much if not more from them as they learned from me.
As some of our dedicated readers may recall, I wrote a piece a month ago about the way in which microfinance lending has revolutionized the economic prospects of poor women living in developing countries. Women take out small loans from community banks that lend to them without collateral, using networks of social responsibility to ensure repayment on the loans.
Not only are the loans almost always repaid, but the women entrepreneurs use the small amounts that they borrow to start a wide array of sustainable businesses, including raising livestock, selling produce, marketing artisanal craft products and opening small stores to provided needed goods to their communities. In many of these cases, women also learn more than a trade. They learn business skills, money management and literacy while being empowered as economic agents.
In Kenya, I was lucky enough to visit a Masai village and learn about their traditional culture. The Masai people are traditionally known as warriors. They are a cattle-herding nomadic people who have lived in the Masai Mara region of Kenya, near the border with Tanzania, for thousands of years. Though their society is polygamous and patriarchal, women have taken on an increasingly prominent role in recent years.
Today, Masai women are strong advocates for educating their children, both boys and girls, and are at the forefront of running small businesses that bring income into their communities and trading with neighbors for food and clothing. Micro-credit lending has enabled many of the Masai women to leverage the resources available to them in the community and use the funds to become business owners. While there are plenty skills that these female micro-entrepreneurs can learn from highly educated women who work in finance and law, we can also learn from them.
Here are three examples of skills that I saw the Masai women demonstrating that can easily be applied in the financial services industry:
- Find creative uses for the resources you have. The Masai micro-entrepreneurs get a lot of mileage out of the cow. Since they raise cattle, they largely subsist on products such as beef, milk and the blood of cows, which they drink mixed with milk. They build their homes from local grasses and waterproof them with cow dung, which they also use as fuel. They dry the skins for use as clothing and bedding. Western financiers can look to this model of economic efficiency for inspiration. While your clients might not appreciate a tasty cow’s blood cocktail, they certainly would applaud you for taking stock of their resources and strengths and thinking of creative ways to leverage the assets that they already have to create more value and keeping costs down by making the best possible use of in-house talent and resources.
- Know the fair value of your product and bargain hard. Despite cultural assumptions that Masai women are deferent and subservient, the female micro-entrepreneurs I met were anything but. Whether they were selling crafts to tourists or trading for prized products such as eggs, fruit and vegetables or cloth, they knew exactly how much their products were worth and did not take a penny less. They also did not walk away from a deal until they had sold their product, and they used a variety of persuasive tricks to overcome the reluctance of potential buyers. Know how much your product is worth and don’t settle for less. Too often, women, even high-level women working on finance and law, get bullied into accepting less than they are worth. This can mean not pushing as hard to get the best terms on a deal or not fighting for higher compensation for yourself, because you fear being perceived as aggressive and overly pushy. Instead, don’t be afraid to speak up and bargain hard, whether it’s on behalf of your clients or yourself. It will only benefit you in the long run.
- Finally, try to add value to every transaction. When the Masai entrepreneurs see that you don’t want to buy anything more, then they offer to trade for additional products and services. They also throw in free items of small value to make buyers feel like they are getting the benefit of the bargain. They offer people samples of their product to demonstrate their authenticity and superiority compared to the competition. Similarly, in tough economic times, Western women in finance can try to think of innovative ways to add value to transactions, whether it is by providing additional products and services to clients that they would normally seek elsewhere at higher cost, or repackaging traditional products to adapt to client’s individualized needs.
As they say in Swahili after completing a deal, “Karibu. Asante sana.”
