North and west of Accra, driving along the good road to Kumasi, the landscape becomes hilly and lush with tall trees rising out of a floating carpet of banana and plantain trees. Early Sunday morning Justin commandeered Fred and his taxi for two days as we ventured to the village of Osino. We picked up Doug and Jesse, the two Tufts undergrads who have been helping with the task of market definition, and ambled along the main road, leaving the dust and haze of the city behind us.

A couple hours later we pulled off at the Bunso junction, bounced along a bumpy dirt road past the Cocoa Research Institute, and eventually found our way to a gated dirt track lined with royal palms straight as toothpicks and happy as could be, regal green crowns swaying lazily in the breeze fifty feet up. It was the Bunso arboretum, an oasis of cool zephyrs, darting lizards, and trees heavy with voluptuous fruit: oranges, paw-paw (papaya), plantains, bananas, coconuts, cocoa, limes, palm nuts, and even Ghana’s only Brazil nuts. Here, dawdling along the narrow paths through the jungle, a sharp knife entitled us to full bellies and chins sticky with sweet juice. On that note, a tremendous thanks to Patty and Joe for the Leatherman.

The other natural growth along the winding paths is the family farm—typically a couple of mud huts with corrugated iron roofs and a clearing in the middle with a clay stove and some low benches. Here families produce any of the fruits mentioned above, and/or maize, palm oil, palm wine, and apiteshie (Ghanaian firewater, distilled from palm wine). Embarrassingly it felt like National Geographic to come upon these homesteads nestled in the hills of the Eastern Region. But these are not tribal Africans; they’re just on the frontier of the ever-expanding stain of technology and consumer culture that is seeping outward from Accra and Kumasi, slowed but never stopped, even by the steepest hills and thickest vegetation. Sometime in the not-so-distant future the entire national fabric will be soaked. The evidence: in the clearing of one such homestead are the innards of some old computers strewn randomly in the red dust. Here a PCI card, there a crushed processor, some of the plastic skeleton of a CRT monitor, a motherboard.

But they haven’t been dyed quite yet with the indelible ink of “civilization”. The family whose homestead was closest to the Bunso arboretum’s guesthouse (where we parked the car and arranged for the night’s lodging) agreed to cook the five of us a lunch of groundnut stew with beef knuckles, omotuo (a Sunday treat of white rice balls), and unlimited fruit for $5; and while the two adult women (looked to be at most 30 years old each) took the reins on the stew and rice, a troupe of naked and half-naked children went to work scampering up tall trees to gather fruit. The task of hacking open coconuts with a long, rusty machete was left to a five-year-old girl, sitting innocent and nude in the red dirt, who grinned and cooed delightedly each time the blade’s ghastly arc ended with a dull thud in the thick husk.

We spent the rest of the day exploring the narrow paths, stumbling on clearings where cocoa seeds dried in the sun on large thatch tables and passing cloudy springs attended by children filling large water buckets to spirit back to their respective compounds.

Monday morning it was off to work—that is, to the Osino branch of the Mumuado Rural Bank. A fairly new two-story affair, it is easily the biggest and most imposing building in town. On the stoop (as on every Ghanaian bank’s stoop) sit two police, each armed with a shotgun. In a back room of the ground floor are the bank’s archives. According to their records, Mumuado has serviced some 5,000 loans. Most of their lending occurred before they adopted their current dismal computerized record-keeping system, and so the bulk of the bank’s loan records are on paper in bright pink folders stacked on every flat surface in the cramped room. Opening the drawers of the lone file cabinet, one finds the folders stacked vertically in no particular order. Since space is scarce and organization nonexistent, old files (read: “those whose pink folders have faded slightly”) have been discarded seemingly at random over the past few years. What remains is a disordered scrapbook full of snapshots of rural financial life.

One such snapshot:

House No. XXX

OSINO

September 24 2002

The Manager

Mumuado Rural Bank Ltd

Osino

Dear Sir,

Application for Loan

I wish to apply for a loan of ¢300,000 [about $35]. This will enable me maintain my cocoa farm.

I am a customer of your bank with Savings Account No. xxx

I hope this my humble application will meet your kind consideration.

Thank you for your co-operation and assistance.

Yours faithfully,

xxxxxxxx

Since we had to wade through all the files (a few thousand), we saw many letters like this one, most handwritten or typed on a typewriter. Only a couple of the agricultural loan applications asked for more than $100.

Our idea, on this smallest of scales, is to integrate a crop price insurance option into Mumuado’s Agric-loan product. If all goes according to plan, we’ll market two kinds of Agric-loans to farmers in the Eastern Region, where Mumuado has all five of its branches. The first will be the current Agric-loan, which charges 25% flat annual rate, with no repayment schedule (a concession to the reality that a farmer’s income is not steady enough to support any kind of regular payment plan). If this sounds like a recipe for default, it is—most borrowers end up repaying the loan in just two or three installments, and most don’t make any payments until the term is at least half over. Their demand for money and their ability to pay coincide with the farming cycle of planting and harvesting, and the growing season looms as a chasm of uncertainty for farmer and creditor alike.

The worst case scenario is that the farmer, having planned for the harvest when he took the loan, goes to sell his produce in the eleventh hour and finds that the price is low. Fearing default, he sells when he otherwise would have waited for the price to increase. Thus, the second type of Agric-loan we’ll market allows farmers to pay extra in return for integrated crop-price insurance. That is, if prices are low when the harvest comes in, some of the debt is forgiven. Our task is to price the insurance option appropriately based upon governmental data (records of prices by crop, by week, by region) and Mumuado’s pink folders, which should reveal historically how strongly default is correlated with low crop prices. The study wants to see how many, and what kind (in poverty-level), of farmers are interested in buying this kind of insurance; and then to track the outcomes for purchasers and non-purchasers. Does the safety net of crop insurance create a disincentive for farmers to try their hardest? How, if at all, does the bank stand to gain from offering this product? Does that sound fun?

More fun than any study-planning, though, was our ride home from Osino, which took us past Koforidua (capital city of the Eastern Region) where we dropped Justin, and then through Fred’s (our driver’s) hometown where he surprised his parents with a visit. On the good road from Koforidua to Kumasi, which winds through many such villages, his is a smaller one, a dirt road that spikes off one side of the paved one. We turned onto it around 8pm, so it was dark; but people were still up and about. Close to the paved road there were some chop bars (generic term for restaurant) and spots (generic term for bar), and people sat at plastic tables outside, eating, drinking, and talking.

Fred slowly snaked the car through this scene, slapping hands and exchanging shouted greetings with friends he had not seen since he last visited at Christmas ‘05. We continued down the dirt road about a quarter mile, parked the car, and were led through down a narrow, dusty path through a stand of banana trees to a clearing and a rectangular house whose painted cement walls glowed bright white in the moonlight. There was a woman bob-hoppering some wooden benches around the clearing who didn’t notice our arrival until Fred walked up to her and tapped her on the shoulder. She let out a scream of utter delight and wrapped up her son in a big bear hug. Chattering with happy anxiety she bob-hoppered the benches back to the center of the clearing and bustled inside the house to rally her husband and her other children. They all came out and hugged Fred and sat and talked. They wanted to know what their eldest son and big brother had been up to. Fred is a farmer’s son who up and left his small town in search of bigger and better things. So, especially to his younger brothers, he is the embodiment of worldliness. He is the first in the family to move to Accra, and he returned wearing fancy white leather shoes and a shiny watch. Naturally, they wanted to hear everything.

But, for his part, Fred’s dad mostly cooed and yowled and moaned the unmistakable animal sounds of parental caring and content. Do you know these sounds? Oooo, and owww, and awwhhhh, inflected with a high tone at first and then falling like a slide whistle, petering out deep in the throat. I will remember that scene for a long time and the palpable feeling of homecoming that was created there by the moonlight and the different sounds in the clearing.

After twenty minutes or so we continued on our way and arrived in Accra around 10pm. Tuesday it was back to work at OI. This week our attention has turned to developing a short, easy, and accurate poverty-level assessment for the 6606 business owners whose shops we’ve been counting these past three weeks. With five multiple-choice questions we aim to be able to estimate the likelihood that a respondent is poor (defined as some level of daily expenditure) within a few percentage points. It’s very interesting, and also kind of uncomfortably clinical: “Should we ask whether they have a pit toilet in the house? If they use a bucket that they empty by hand into an open sewer, should that go under other?” To help formulate good questions we are fortunate to have the accumulated data of the Ghana Living Standards Survey, a huge national census conducted every few years, which incorporates questions like these. So at least we’re not flying completely blind into the bathrooms (or latrines, or public toilets, or holes in the ground) of Accra.

Still, it seems to be a world away from the longest-term goal of helping people. The road from here to “progress” looks something like this: rigorous study hopefully convinces donors to give more to banks and microfinance institutions so they can offer new and different products, which potentially expands credit access to poorer people, which gives them a fighting chance to scale up their enterprises, amass capital, and prosper on their own. It’s a nice, if Rube-Goldbergish, diagram. Can I get a flowchart?

Anyway, it’s refreshing to spend some time in the air-conditioned oasis that is the OI main branch, and to indulge in the thought that what seems like an academic project might actually ripple out into the real world.

Finally, happy belated Thanksgiving to all. I thought wistfully about turkey, stuffing, and cranberry sauce most of the day yesterday; and in my mind I had a real feast, attended by just about everyone who might read this blog. You were, naturally, great company.

So best wishes, full bellies, warm fires, and much love.