March 12, 2002
If there are 20 women selling tomatoes in your local market, and most of them go home with tomatoes left at the end of the day, is it a good idea to open another tomato stand?
If the answer is obvious to you, I bet you are accustomed to a first world economy.
Unfortunately, that does sound like a good idea to many people here.
My friends Megan and Kim in Facobly, Cote d’Ivoire, are working with two cooperatives. The cooperatives want to earn money to pay for literacy classes for adults in their villages. Both cooperatives decided to grow vegetables and sell them in the local market. Unfortunately, there are plenty of other vegetable stalls in the local market. The cooperatives chose to sell vegetables because that's what they know how to do, and because they don't have the basis for figuring out how to choose a better idea.
Megan and Kim asked me to spend a day and a half with each cooperative to help give them more business knowledge. We decided to cover the basics of a business feasibility study, bookkeeping, and pricing.
The first cooperative class was made up of men who will teach the literacy classes. They all spoke French and they all had at least a high school education. The training went well, although it was clear that I need to strengthen my French business vocabulary. By the end of the first full day we had done a lot of work with Feasibility Studies and SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for a business).
I was quite happy when the group threw out the idea of selling tomatoes and chose instead to sell hot peppers. Hot peppers can be dried and sold off season, or ground into a powder and sold all year. The group had moved one step beyond tomatoes!
The second day we covered the basics of bookkeeping and pricing. For the pricing example, I gave each group a baggie of 20 pieces of candy. I told each group to choose a price for selling the candy. The groups chose a variety of prices. Then I added information telling them what their electricity and transportation costs were. That made some groups losing money based on the price they chose. Ah – ha ! The lesson here? You should collect as much information on your expenses before you set your price. From there we went further into profitability. Since this is an agricultural society, the "market price" drives everything, and profitability isn’t an issue people think about. But I urged the group to calculate the profitability of their ventures, and if it is not very high, do another feasibility study to find a more profitable product.
This group seemed to get all the concepts I was introducing. I left them with a lot of homework. They are to outline the rules governing specifically how the cooperative will share the work. They must figure out who will hold the money, who will do the bookkeeping, and who will do surprise cash counts. I insisted they find three people to handle the money transactions to reduce theft. And, finally, the group has to complete its feasibility study to decide whether dried hot peppers are definitely the product they are going to go with this year. Megan will work through those steps with the cooperative.
The second class was more challenging!!! The class was mostly women who are illiterate and non-numeric. They also don’t speak French. I was translated by the cooperative leader into their local language of Wobé (woe’bay). That slowed us down considerably!! In addition, the concepts in the class were totally new to the women.
My translator did a fantastic job. He built his own examples that the women could understand, based on their daily lives in their village. This group had planned to sell vegetables in their market. After the SWOT analysis exercise (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats), the group chose to cultivate and sell fish and eggplant. The fish can be sold fresh or dried, and the eggplant will be grown off season so they can get a better price for it. This means the eggplant will have to be watered by hand or by irrigation ditches, but the women felt the increase in price was worth the extra work.
I was thrilled that this group was able to grasp these new concepts and choose more interesting (and more profitable, we hope) products to sell. What an accomplishment!
Because this group was non-numeric, I did not cover accounting or pricing. I did, however, introduce the concept of selling at a profit or a loss, and the concept of including a living wage for yourself rather than " working for free " as so many people here seem to do.
I am thrilled with the results of both trainings. Too often, people here open businesses without thought about the competition or the profit involved. They choose something they know, like vegetables or sewing, without looking at the larger picture. I cannot tell you how many identical corner markets are located right next to each other all over Cote d’Ivoire, all with the exact same items and exact same prices!! I find the same thing in the village and town markets. There are 20 women selling eggplant during eggplant season, 20 women selling tomatoes during tomato season, and 20 women selling oranges during orange season.
To be able to talk to people about the need for differentiation, selling products off season, and perhaps adding some value to their products (mango jam or dried mangoes instead of simply mangoes), is, I think, what Cote d’Ivoire needs. And to know that both groups understood the message, even on a basic level, enough to change their minds about being the 21st tomato seller in the local market, is more than enough reward for me.