Running a small business is tough anywhere. It requires dedication, long hours, and multiple skill sets. For a couple in east Africa, it requires picking through garbage, washing filthy plastic bags with care, and using them as stuffing for hand-made dolls.
In this moving video, we watch Juma and Asia make and sell animal dolls to tourists in their Tanzanian village and online at their website, arushacleaner.com. We watch as they collect the plastic bag “waste” from their village and turn it into something that is not waste: stuffing for brightly-colored monkey or giraffe dolls. This is the best kind of small business: enterprising, self-supporting and giving back to the community.
The Mazingira Monkey Project is an example for budding entrepreneurs everywhere. All the precepts of a small business are here:
When choosing a business idea, follow your passion: Mazingira means environment in Swahili, and Juma explains that he chose the name because “I love the environment.”
Keep your operation lean: We follow Juma through Arusha village, where he collects the trash plastic and buys soap; to the river, where he hand carries water to the bank to wash the bags; to his two-room house where he and his wife make the dolls by hand; to the nearby town of Jambo, where he sells them.
Focus on your goals: Juma’s goals are simple. Selling the monkey dolls helps him to buy food, clothing and shoes for his family of six. Survival is a powerful incentive.
Contribute to the community: Some 20,000 ugly plastic bags are now inside children’s toys instead of “flying around the streets of Arusha town.”
Have a strategic plan: Juma is clear on his goal: to ramp up sales from 10 dolls to 100 per month, to allow capital investment and expansion. He would like to invest in a sewing machine and move the “office” out of his two-room home.
There are thousands of entrepreneurs all over the world, like Juma, who could take their business to a more comfortable and sustainable level with the tiniest of loans. I recently attended the fourth birthday party of the wonderful organization Kiva, which provides a portal where members of the public, known as Kiva Lenders, can give micro-loans (as small as $25) to enterprising people–83% of them women–around the world who need a small hand to help them on the road to self-sufficient sustainability. Since its founding, Kiva Lenders have loaned over $100 million to a quarter of a million recipients in 49 countries. My colleague Kas Neteler writes about her takeaways from the Kiva event here.
A recent New York Times article reported on a blog post that took Kiva to task for insufficient transparency. David Roodman, writing for the Center for Global Development, pointed out that many of Kiva’s loans are made to individuals before the Kiva Lender has selected him/her as a target project. In essence, the organization’s “story” of one-to-one lending was really window dressing for the support of a global network of microfinance organizations. Roodman goes on to praise Kiva for its work, and his piece elicited a lot of attention.
Nonprofit organizations dress up their messages with personal appeals all the time: personalizing monetary gifts with assurances that your donation buys books for this library shelf, rice for this starving child, or a theater seat that would not be there without you. It’s a common and effective way to concretize the experience of an exchange of the ultimate intangible, money.
The uproar has had its effect on Kiva. As the Times points out, “Where its home page once promised, ‘Kiva lets you lend to a specific entrepreneur, empowering them to lift themselves out of poverty,’ it now simply states, after Mr. Roodman’s post: ‘Kiva connects people through lending to alleviate poverty.’” Kiva President Premal Shah noted they had not seen any drop-off in business due to the publicity so far.
The learning from this brouhaha for organizations is that in this age of skepticism, universal information access and citizen journalism, transparency is not just important; it’s essential. But there is also a takeaway for individuals: by all means be vigilant and think critically, but beware of letting skepticism overwhelm into cynicism, where the perfect becomes the enemy of the good. Like tribes, organizations tell stories to describe the essence of their operations. Each of Kiva’s stories crystallizes how microfinance makes the world a better place for struggling entrepreneurs like Juma.
A version of this post appeared previously on Care2.com
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