mdn247

Malaika Neri
OTIV Alaotra Mangoro
Ambatondrazaka, Madagascar

Of course, I was thrilled.
Lôla gave me his number!

We had just finished watching the concert he had performed for over 2000 people, all of them Malagasy, save for the four of us – my three French friends, and I – the sole vazahas in the crowd.

The show was great – Lôla, one of Madagascar’s most popular musical artists, sang his heart out, and besides being a stellar performer, he seemed to put his whole heart into singing songs about taxi brousses (Madagascar’s inter-city bus transport that very thoroughly communicates a sense of what sardines must feel like, as they bounce along bumpy roads in metal canisters), ex-lovers, and joie de vivre.

With the sun setting in a red flame behind the blond hairs of Christophe (an intern an agricultural collaboration project between Agence France de Développement (AFD) and the Malagasy government), Lôla ended his concert, shouting “Veloma, tompoko (Goodbye, everyone)!” into the microphone, before he went offstage. People all around us began ambling towards the exit. Many of the men gave me a red-eyed leer as they sauntered past – a look usually accompanied by “Bonjour vazaha!” when the voyeur is sober.

Hélène, a française working on a collaborative agricultural development project between a French département and the region of Alaotra Mangoro to increase the productivity of milk-producing cows, grabbed my hand, whispering, “Tu penses qu’il va nous donner un autographe?”
But even as she asked, and as we consequently bounded towards the backstage area, where Lôla stood surrounded by a crowd of eager and inebriated Malagasy fans, we knew.

We knew we were assured of an autograph.

We knew that all Hélène had to do was to whip out her digital camera, and Lôla would bypass every other fan to come stand beside two excited foreigners, obliging us with a photograph and a smile.

We knew, because we are vazaha.

Lôla proceeded to ask me if I wanted his number (US tour, anyone?). Sure, yeah, why not!

It can be pretty cool, this vazaha business. I know that I can waltz into the Bank of Africa, and ask to speak with the directeur. Ten minutes later, we’re conversing in his plush office, and he’s saying almost-yes to my request for another meeting.

“I tried to apply for an internship there, but the secretary wouldn’t let me speak to the director,” a Malagasy friend complained to me. Narina is 27, and an Ambatondrazaka native.

“But I had no problem!” I said, eyes widening.

“That’s because you’re vazaha,” she said, matter-of-factly.
And even as I rushed to contradict her, wanting very badly not to let my sometimes burdensome privilege create any sort of rift in our relationship, I knew she was right.

Because even as I’m here to learn about development, to think about working in development, to make friends with other people working in development and ease my way into the ever-growing network of “development professionals,” development is still the domain of the vazaha, at least in Madagascar.

All of the country’s largest companies are owned by vazahas.

Because when the 1970’s socialist government sold of state-owned assets, only les étrangères had enough capital to buy them.

“Mais, Madame,” said Rivo, a gangly, seventeen-year-old standing up behind a rickety desk. I had been teaching his ingilisy class about finance and credit en anglais, and simultaneously promoting OTIV and its savings and loan instruments. “You tell us that ‘capital’ means a very large sum of money…if I take out a loan for capital, how will I ever pay it all back?”

But even as my colleague, Madame Naina, very quickly told Rivo that his borrowing amin’ny l’OTIV would be strictly confined to his capacité à rembourser, I wondered if Rivo would ever have a great deal of capital with which to play.

In America, we have venture capitalism. In Madagascar, they have dreams. And even though OTIV is development project hanging somewhere between the two polarities, it doesn’t seem adequate.

Today, every single development project (as far as I know) in Madagascar is externally-funded. The nickel and cobalt mines in Moromanga constructed with Japanese, Korean, and Canadian dinero. The French stagiaires who have become my friends, all working on their theses about agricultural credit. The Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) who live and work in small towns and villages teaching English and business development and nutrition and contraception, speak fluent gasy, and inform the locals that, no, we don’t have dinosaurs in America. Even CECAM, our microfinance competitor, is a UNDP baby.

“Moi, personellement, I thank you for your initiative,” said Monsieur Jocelyn, chef de l’exploitation at OTIV, to me, his honey-coloured eyes very serious. “Somehow, that initiative is missing at our office.”

Indeed, that initiative seems to be missing in Malagasy development efforts in general.

“You know, the [development] project starts out just fine when the vazahas come and set things up,” recounted the directeur-adjoint of OTIV, as we trundled along the route goudronnée between Toamasina, Madagascar’s premier port, and Moramanga, a transit town south of Ambato. “But then, the vazahas leave, and boof!” he exclaimed, hands flying apart in an explosive gesture, ironic laughter twinkling in his dark eyes.

Human rights are all very well and good. Heck, they’re incredibly exciting. But what if all the vazahas just up and left Mada? Would development continue?

“I fear for them,” Madame Lavine, a French transplant and directrice of the Alliance Française, said to me, shaking her head, looking out her office window at the soft, brown mountains in the distance. “The rest of the world is going to keep developing, and they’re just going to stay the same, and eventually they’ll fall so far behind that they’ll never be able to catch up.”

So then, is development a human right if it seems like only certain humans can make things right?

Malaika Neri
OTIV Alaotra Mangoro
Ambatondrazaka, Madagascar

”We’re not touching the lowest couche of the population,” she said, looking me straight in the eyes. “We tried, and [the credit risk] just wasn’t worth it.”

There it was: a slap in the face of microfinance.

Madame Eugenie, head of the Crédit avec Education program created by Freedom From Hunger (FFH – an American non-profit) at OTIV, had been explaining OTIV’s manifestation of the savings program designed around solidarity group loans – a lending model popularized by Muhammad Yunus of the Grameen Bank and Nobel Prize fame.

Someone from OTIV heads out to a village and proposes an Association de Crédit (AC) – a borrower’s group that needs no physical collateral to get its feet wet with loans. Instead, they rely on conscience solidaire – every woman in a Groupe de Solidarité (GS) of four to six people promises to insure the others’ loans and timely reimbursements. If one member defaults, everyone loses access to future credit.

When a GS member is unable to adequately reimburse her loans, the rest of the group’s members chip in from a pot of collective tahiry, or savings. And if a GS can’t complete the balance of the repayment, members from other GS – who together form an AC – can chip in, so that OTIV gets back all of its money.

“The way FFH created the program, we’re supposed to target the poorest women of society – les groupes défavorisées,” continued Madame Eugenie. “But it was toujours un échec – always a failure.”

“Les pauvres,” she elaborated, “only think of living day to day. It’s hard enough trying to get them to save their money. Repaying their loans is a whole other story. And many of them are chômeurs – unemployed.”

Instead, OTIV opts for a safer bet: la classe moyen, or middle class Malagasy: women who already have a little money, who are looking “for a bit of déroulement.” Every week, they meet with an animatrice from OTIV, who helps them organize themselves. After the first month of “training,” during which the mpikambana, or members, are sensibilisé to the rules of the AC, the women assess each other’s loan requests, and also begin with the éducation. The animatrice – typically an employee from one of OTIV’s caisses – teaches the women about alimentation, AIDS, breastfeeding, la diarrhée – everything to do with health, and all towards the goal of eradicating chronic malnutrition. After the première cycle, they continue with business development – sharing savoir-faire on growing an entreprise and developing a clientele.

And so far, the program, which began in 2000, has been a hit, with high repayment rates. In 2006, the Malagasy government in Tana sat up and took notice, permitting its expansion throughout the island country where microfinance flexes a bigger muscle than the capital-flush Bank of Africa, and its Malagasy cousin, BNI.

Yet for all its successes (and there are many, because women tend to make for very reliable borrowers), Crédit avec Education is not reaching the poorest of the poor, primarily due to the dearth of a culture of saving.

“Microfinance worked so well in Bangladesh because they already have an ingrained idea of saving money,” exclaimed a Peace Corps volunteer I met during my first week here, referencing the Grameen Bank in Dhaka. “Here, it’s a different story; people simply don’t save.”

“The questions are always about credit,” laughed Madame Naina, who runs most of the marketing efforts at OTIV. “That’s because we’re poor, us malagasy.”

The former head of Madagacar’s sénat explained a different angle.
“All the paysans are screwed,” he said, shaking his head. We were sitting in my host family’s restaurant, under the tube lights that populate every Malagasy establishment and home.

“Thing is, they take out a loan from OTIV. Then they can’t repay it, so they run off to CECAM (another local microfinance, funded by the UNDP) for another loan to repay the one from OTIV. And the cycle continues.”

This might sound familiar. Two years ago, it was all that BBC and CNN were talking about: lots of people with loans (i.e., sub-prime mortgages). Lots of people unable to repay their loans. A slew of defaults. Et voilà: a financial crisis. OTIV is in a similar muck, because the business (even if it’s not-for-profit) of lending to people who aren’t habituated to saving is a tricky one.

How do you teach people to save when they seem to have no desire to do so?
We’ve been trying, petit à petit, to spread the “it’s good to save!” message in schools around town, in French and English and Malagasy and lots of emphatic hand-wagging, and now at the regional foire – a giant amalgam of vendors from all over Alaotra Mangoro – but I keep wondering if the idea is going through, if the message translates class and race, if the listener has stopped focusing on the fact that I’m a vazaha – a stranger in a strange land – and has started listening to how tahiry can be a really good thing.

Of course, there’s value in a project that provides capital to those who stand no chance of gaining access to credit at one of the banks. But if microfinance isn’t helping out the poorest of the world’s poor in a “very poor” country, then what is?

Malaika Neri
Ambatondrazaka, Madagascar
OTIV Alaotra Mangoro

The stars are the most beautiful. Big, gleaming orbs of light that has travelled across the universe shine down, brightening a broad night in a small town amidst rice paddies and fields of green beans.

They are bright, those stars, but I can’t see them in New York City because we’re all plugged in, connected yet disconnected.

My fingers hover over the keyboard, unsure how to describe this experience. Unsure how to explain the amalgamation of frustration and contentment.
Because this is a slow island. Camions (Quebecois for big trucks) rumble slowly over mud roads strewn with pebbles. And everywhere, there is bevuvka, the endless poussière that rises up from the red African soil to coat cars, clothes, trees and nostrils with a layer of brown dust.

People walk slowly, ambling to work at five in the morning, and ambling home as the sun sets around five in the evening, exposing a blood-orange crease in the belly of this big, big sky. At my office, a bastion of bureaucracy in a town full of small and medium enterprises (SMEs – certainly one of my favourite acronyms), everyone sits down to work at seven-thirty or eight a.m., but jumps out of their seats once an hour for a pose.

Often, I’m irritated by the passivity. The total disregard for a need to work hard to gagner l’argent, or make a living. The Malagasy seem to amble through life, not perturbed in the least by a desire to improve their country, or province, or city, or even, fokontany, or neighbourhood.

I came to Madagascar to learn about economic development, to learn how life can be better for the family of eight who live in a wooden shack measuring seven feet by six, and pays for tomorrow with the income they earn today, as millions do on this island that has ballooned to a population of twenty million since independence from France in 1965, but remains “poor,” according to World Bank statistics, with per capita income hovering slightly about $250 per year. It is very much a tany an-dalam-pandrosoana – a country on the road to development – something that Kofi and Barack would surely earmark as an essential human right. I thought working at OTIV (a microfinance started with World Bank funds and technical help from the Canadian aid organization, Développement International Desjardins (DID) – a savings and loan association (SLA, in financial lingo) consisting primarily of agriculteurs (farmers) would teach me about development, and microfinance as a tool in its pursuit.

But I’m learning less about development as defined by Millenium Development Goals (MDGs – not a favourite acronym, for sure) and more about fitivanana – what Westerners/Greeks call agape, what philosophers call ‘The Golden Rule,’ what Christians call The First Commandment. Loving your brother as you love yourself, stemming from fiavanana: the harmony at the base of Malagasy culture, and the reason they, unlike most “poor” countries on this continent, have not had a war in over fifty years.

“So many people come here, and they ask, Why are they not developed?!” recounted Miguel, a French conservation biologist I met during my first week here. “And then you look around, and you think, They’ll never be developed. But after you’ve been here for a while, you realize, they don’t want development.”

They don’t say “developing country” in French. They call it a ‘pays en voie du developpement,’ a country in need of development. It irritates me no end that the Malagasy don’t feel that way.

And on the flip side of the irritation is amazement. I’m speechless, riding a creaky Chinese bicycle through the calm of the rizières (rice fields), gaping when the sun exits its expert hiding spot behind a group of nuages, clouds that bring rain in December and only cold winds in July. I’m astounded to see groups of young, healthy, able-bodied men hanging out on the sidewalk, petra-petraka-ing their day away. The shock continues every time I enter the home of one of Ambatondrazaka’s wealthy families, every time I sit down with my own very wealthy host family to eat a meal of two different kinds of meat, more than most could afford, replete with gourmet Chinese mushrooms, on tablecloths purchased in Tana, the capital.

The shock sometimes becomes apathy when, every morning at a breakfast of Nesquik and pain malgache, I open The Elusive Quest for Growth, a tome by NYU’s very own William Easterly and part of my colloquium reading, that decries past approaches to development.

Because there’s still no blanket solution.

“We just don’t have enough capital,” said my boss, on my second day in Madagascar. “Everyone wants loans, and we don’t have enough épargnes, (savings accounts) to approve them all.”

In New York, an island swimming in tidal waves of cash, I never worry about a dearth of capital. Indeed, our infamous financial crisis of two years ago was the very result of too much disbursed too quickly. But here in Madagascar, after I’ve wiped the dust from my eyes, I continue to see poverty, bad roads, and one too many children with orange hairs that belie protein deficiencies.

“People are poor because they lack access to capital,” Donald Trump once chirped. And one would assume that granting people access to capital starts them on the path out of poverty. But, I’m learning, it isn’t that simple.

“Look around you!” cried one of OTIV’s chefs, on a recent trip to visit a caisse, or local bank, in Andilamena, a small town north of us renowned for its pierres précieuses, or gemstones. “Take a picture!” he gesticulated, pointing to a group of children and their mothers, from whom we were purchasing illegally-harvested charcoal briquettes. “See the poverty of Madagascar! Nous sommes pauvres!”

“Absolutely!” I felt like yelling back. “But so are millions of people in India and China and Albania and Mongolia!”

OTIV works to enable people to pull themselves out of poverty – what we define as the inability to pay for a child’s school tuition, the impossibility of affording a car, and the limitations on disposable income – by providing them with bootstraps: quite simply, capital, in the form of prets (loans) and tahiry (savings).

My knee-jerk reaction to the multiple descriptions of poverty in this green and fertile country has always been, try harder! Perhaps it’s due to an inculcated “pull yourselves up by the bootstraps” philosophy so venerated in America, but here, development has always been an idea brought in from the outside. And most Malagasy are habituated to outside help. This combines with a cultural passivity, bred in schools wherein students are taught to respond, “Oui Madame” instead of asking pointed questions, to produce a country that takes a very laid-back approach to the future, preferring to enjoy roasted misikita while swatting away the incessant flies, rather then worrying about national strategies de lutte contre la pauvreté.

But then, I find myself falling into the trap of blaming poor people for their own poverty. Multiple times a day, I want to grab the shoulders of the graphic dessinateur and marketing coordinatrice – colleagues with whom I’m trying to design a new marketing campaign for OTIV – and shake them up, ask them to be more creative, more innovative, to care more about their own organization.

“But you see, it’s like that,” sighed my host mother, one of the few I’ve met who has travelled à l’extérieur. “Here, when you find an office job, that’s it. You stay put. What else is there? And people just while away their time taking breaks, chatting and chatting. Then they complain that there’s too much work. It’s not like chez toi.”

No, it’s most certainly not what I’m used to, this lackadaisical lifestyle in which the music never stops, the laughter is frequent, babies are not an inconvenience, and Sundays are a day of rest. But I’m learning to suppress my desire to speed things up; I’m learning to appreciate that there’s always enough time for a second cup of tea, for another conversation, for another glass of freshly-pressed orange juice after lunch.

Because no one is in a hurry. No one is rushing toward development.