Piloting + sacking

While Accra continues shamble along as only it can, I have found myself less captivated by its peculiar rhythms since I’ve returned. Familiarity leads to monotony; or is it the other way around? Yes—I think it’s the latter.

In the past two weeks work has been the focus. We’ve reached a major hurdle—the beginning of the pilot—and I think we’re in the process of clearing it. But this is not a simple run-and-jump deal. Every miniscule movement of our collective striding legs is an excruciating coordination of myriad twitching nerves.

But what’s the pilot anyway? For that matter, what’s the project for which it serves as preliminary research? These are questions I have not yet answered in this rambling blog, and I will try to do so in the following paragraphs.

The project I was hired to work on is an Interest Rate Sensitivity Study for individual microloans. The set-up is as follows. I work for Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), a US-based NGO run by development economists. Most generally, our output is papers to be (hopefully) published in academic journals. More specifically, those papers tend to be write-ups of field experiments in economic development—particularly in the science of evaluating development programs. The question that guides IPA’s research is, broadly: What works in development, and why?

In some remote corner of that question lives microfinance; in some nook in that corner are microloans; in one cranny of that nook are microloans; and on one grain of sand in that nook is the individual loan product offered by Opportunity International – Sinapi Aba Savings and Loans (OISASL). IPA has partnered with OISASL to investigate the following specific questions: How do individuals at various poverty levels respond to different interest rates in microloans? Do particular interest rates attract certain types of borrowers? Are people’s abilities to repay dependent on the interest rate offered?

To answer these questions, we have designed the study that has just entered the pilot phase. For the first two months of my stay here, we pounded the hot pavement of Accra cataloguing some 7,000 businesses large and small—everything from sidewalk stands selling mangoes to more sophisticated operations in permanent buildings with multiple employees. These 7,000 were divided into 125 geographic clusters (think of a cluster as comprising all the businesses on a given city block), and to each cluster we will randomly assign one of four different interest rates.

Next we developed a poverty-level assessment (in the form of a short questionnaire) and promotional flyers inviting first-time customers with OISASL to apply for loans. Then comes the labor-intensive step—marketing. It proceeds as follows: an OISASL marketer approaches one of the catalogued businesses, asks the owner the poverty-level assessment questions (e.g. How does your household get drinking water? Do all children age 6-17 in your household attend school regularly? What kind of cooking fuel do you use?), tells him a little bit about our promotional offer, and hands him a flyer advertising loans at the interest rate we have assigned to his cluster, inviting him to come to the branch and fill out an application. Repeat 6,999 times, and we’re done with that step.

Once the business owners have flyers and we have their poverty-level information, it just remains to track their responses. (A) Who comes into the branch? (B) Who continues with the application process? (C) Who is approved? (D) Who is able to repay?

We will accumulate the data necessary to answer those four questions in the year or so following the marketing campaign. Then all that remains is analysis and, finally, writing the paper itself (happily we have Dean Karlan, a rising star in development economics, to do the bulk of the last step).

So that’s the project in a nutshell. The pilot is essentially a short-term, small-scale implementation of that mess. We have selected four clusters (one at each interest rate) and are now marketing to the businesses in them. Our goals for the pilot are (1) to refine our marketing technique, (2) to streamline the reception of study participants in the branch, and (3) to get some estimates of (A) – (C) above. Once we have a sense of what percentage of people will come to the branch, we can set about preparing to handle the additional workload associated with the full study. We will not attempt to study (D) in the pilot, as repayment data only builds up over the life of the loan (typically 6-12 months).

For (2) above I probably should have written “damage control”. It is ultimately a dangerous thing to advertise different rates to different people, especially when many of those people are Ghanaian petty traders, a notoriously gregarious variety. The concern is that we will have a lot of irate customers coming into the branch and laying into the individual loan officers: My friend owns a shop just across the street, and he got a lower rate than me. Give me the lower rate! One reason for randomizing interest rate at the cluster level (as opposed to at the individual level) in the first place was to minimize this issue. If we offer everyone in a given cluster the same interest rate, then hopefully friction will only occur at the edges where it borders on other clusters.

Incredibly, Ghana exhibits extraordinarily resistance to even this most rudimentary instance of advance planning. As I said before, many of the businesses we’ve catalogued are street-side stands. Sometimes goods are laid out on a blanket spread on the sidewalk; other times they are stacked on a table. In downtown Accra these stands are ubiquitous. They seem to occupy 75% of passable sidewalk, and in many areas, especially where there are “rough” (dirt) roads, they spill out into the street. While this makes walking in the city an exhausting exercise in dodging and jostling, it also means that one can buy anything from fresh produce to toilet paper to stereo systems without walking more than a couple blocks. From the seller’s perspective it means a wealth of loosely (if at all) regulated commercial space in a heavily-trafficked market; and a typical sidewalk stand operator has staked out a physical location and a regular customer base that he returns to everyday.

The Accra Metropolitan Assembly (roughly analogous to the Mayor’s office) has decided to put an end to this in one fell swoop. In preparation for Ghana’s Golden Jubilee 50^th Anniversary on March 6 of this year, the AMA is undertaking a number of ambitious projects to improve the look and feel of the capital. While these improvements are ultimately intended to benefit the residents of Accra, most people readily admit that the reason they’re being made—and made quickly—is so that Ghana can put her best foot forward for all the important folks (read “first world tourists and politicians”) coming in for the celebration. In addition to widening some major roads and installing trash cans in public areas (wow!), on Monday they began the systematic “sacking” of all informal street vendors, from hawkers (people selling on foot, carrying their goods in large baskets balanced on their heads) to tabletop stands.

“Sacking” really means forced relocation to one of two locations that have been set aside for the vendors. Most Ghanaians I’ve talked to are thrilled with the results—in the space of three days the downtown streets have been rendered passable again, and the whole area is undeniably cleaner and less chaotic. Until Monday afternoon Makola, a twelve-square-block area just a few minutes walk from the OISASL office, was the densest market in Accra, with vendors completely filling the streets. On Tuesday morning it was unrecognizable: wide, empty thoroughfares with cars timidly poking along, still not sure if they really belonged there. In corners and against the sides of buildings were piled great drifts of broken and abandoned wooden tables and racks—the dusty, brittle bones of the marketplace.

There is reason to believe that this new arrangement does not constitute a free lunch. For one, the largest area that the AMA has set aside for the vendors is just beside Kwame Nkrumah Circle (known here as “Circle”), which has the dubious honor of being Africa’s largest roundabout. It is easily the most congested area in the city, and the addition of thousands of hawkers and vendors—not to mention their customers, who would otherwise have no reason to go there—is sure to exacerbate the problem. Fortunately Circle is not on the tour bus route.

Above, I introduced “sacking” by way of saying that Ghana had resisted our attempts at planning ahead to avoid complaints about offering different interest rates to different people. About half of our 125 clusters are in areas that have been, or will soon be, sacked. So whereas we had hoped that those clusters, and the vendors comprising them, would remain geographically distinct (even if only separated by a street), now they will be busted up and the sidewalk vendors among them will corralled as tightly as possible into one massive pit.

Recipe for disaster? Maybe. Then again, if things were easy, they’d be too easy.

Much love and cheer from Accra,

Jake

Dust & fighting.

No—it’s not a Clint Eastwood movie. But those two signature Wild West themes have featured in my week so far.

We are now in the grips of the season called the Hammarton. It normally lasts about two months, from late December to the middle of February. Typically it separates some very hot and dry months (October-December) from some very hot and wet months (March-April). It is a little pocket of agreeably mild temperature, with highs typically in the low 80s. There’s even a breeze. But every rose has its thorn; and this thorn is made of choking dust.

I’ve asked a number of Ghanaians and have heard a variety of answers, but most agree at least that the signature winds of the Hammarton come from the north. When wind comes from the south it picks up moisture from the Atlantic and brings humid air into Accra. Although it only rained for about ten minutes total in my first two months here, it was almost always humid and sticky. But when the winds come from the north they carry with them the sands of the Sahel, the desert belt south of the Sahara. The northernmost third of Ghana lies in the Sahel, and I shudder to think what the Hammarton is like up there. In Accra, some 400 miles south, it’s incredibly dry and dusty. The haze is so thick that during the day you can look directly into the sun without hurting your eyes. And the dust is fine as silt; it goes everywhere the air goes. It sneaks between doors and their frames, between the panes of louver windows. There is a film of dust on everything, and it builds up overnight (literally). Today we had the house cleaned, and tomorrow morning I will be able to write “wash me” with my finger on the glass top of our coffee table. I know this for certain.

And if it were only the coffee table, or everything in the house, I probably wouldn’t mention it. But any dust fine enough to sneak through a well-fitting door is also fine enough to sneak through the forest of little hairs inside one’s nose that are supposed to act as an air filter. From there it is only a short journey to the throat and lungs, and that’s when Hammarton becomes very frustrating.

For the first week back it seemed as if the air was just dry. Then yesterday my throat started to feel a little scratchy. This morning I woke up with that feeling where you can’t take a full breath, and with no voice at all. I’ve lost my voice before, but this felt more like the time I tried to swallow a scoopful of protein powder—so dry that the throat winces and contracts, all the water gone from it. Sadly, this has persisted all day. Everyone here says it hasn’t been like this in years. It’s cooler and windier and dustier than was expected. Most every obruni I know, and some Ghanaians, too, are having a hard time with it.

Myself, I do like the cooler weather, but the dust is too much. Even after a dozen or so mugs of tea with (local Ghanaian!) honey today at the office, my voice is nowhere to be found. Damn you, Hammarton.

So even though the Hammarton (let’s just say “dusty season”) in general doesn’t have much going for it, and even though this one in particular is lousier than most, there is one saving grace: pronunciation. I don’t know why, but when Ghanaians intone the word itself they invariably do so with great gusto. Even when it’s said slowly it is zesty, saucy, more like a catchphrase than a meteorological phenomenon. And it always sounds like “Hammertime”. So that’s a throwback right there.

Monday night, before I lost my voice, Justin and I went ate a delightful Indian dinner at the Banana Leafz Kitchen in Osu, the upscale nightlife district of Accra. Afterwards we were walking back towards the main road. When we reached it we saw a white tro-tro pulled to the side with its door swung open. (Some tro-tros have a sliding side door on the right side and a narrow aisle to allow access to the forward-facing bench seats; others, rigged for maximum passengers-as-sardines capacity, have a bench along the right side—leaving an even narrow aisle—and only a paddywagon-style door in the back. This was one of the latter.)

When we first noticed it, about a hundred feet ahead, two men were standing on the street and more were pouring out onto the street, as if from a clown car. They were yelling and, as we approached, the smaller of them pounced at the larger and laid a lightning-fast right hand into his skull. I kept my pace and crossed to the far side of the street, watching as people continued to emerge from the cramped vehicle. In a flash the two were on the ground, the smaller one with his head buried in the other’s chest, fists flailing at his head. The larger, in turn, was pummeling the smaller man’s skull over and over.

Justin had been crossing to the other side with me but then diverted towards the pair and stopped just a few feet short of them. By this time only a couple more passengers had made it out of the tro-tro and they gathered around the two. Everyone looked confused. It was a strange picture, a few Ghanaians and 6’3” Justin in a tight ring around the brawling men.

A few seconds later the crowd had grown and had apparently decided enough was enough: a couple men took off their shoes and started thrashing the snarling pair. Another man slipped off his leather belt with a flourish, raised it high above his head, and began laying into them furiously. There were terrible slapping sounds and the two continued only a short while longer. In the ferocity and desperation of the fighting men; in the way that the bystanders beat them indiscriminately to a stop; in the ragged, bristling panting that followed as they eyed each other afterwards, separated by the man brandishing the belt; it was more like a dogfight than anything else.

By this time Justin had returned to my side of the street (he had left the throng of bystanders around the time when the shoes came off). He said, “I was trying to decide whether or not to get in that.” Let me pause to say that Justin’s interest here was thoroughly that of a Good Samaritan. Nonetheless—get in that? Really?

We began to walk away as the two fighters continued to yell at each other across the belt-man’s outstretched arms. One of them lifted up his shirt to reveal some injury to his torso, then ducked quickly around the belt-man and the pair were at it again, this time tussling into the middle of Oxford St (the main road), stopping traffic there as the crowd, now numbering close to twenty, moved amoeba-like to envelop and separate them.

When we turned our heads for good it was away from a cacophony of yelling and car horns.

Back in the saddle.

Home was so delightful that it flew by like summer camp and the sojourn is too quickly acquiring that dreamlike quality that characterizes the best experiences. Now the game begins: “It was only ___ days/weeks ago that I was _____.” If I can make a temporal chain back to it, it must be real; I could skip a stone across the days back to New Years, back to Family Band Take Two, back to 7 Fairfield.

The first 24 hours back in Ghana I was stricken with a fairly dreadful combination of jetlag and comfortlag. The latter is a condition analogous to the first, except that in comfortlag the body is slow to adapt to a change in—or dearth of—things that make it feel good. Family, good food and beer, friends, down comforters, New York City, and driving a car are all relevant examples. My mind forgot that these things were no longer at hand, and so it operated as if they were. It was like arriving at a friend’s apartment and finding it vacant. There was nobody home, and I felt sharp pricks of loneliness for the first time since I began this journey.

But it passed, largely under the radar, due in no small part to the fact that another raucous workweek began the day after I arrived. Back at the office it’s “business” as usual. On Thursday I desperately hope to begin the Pilot Study, which is really a small-scale mock-up of the interest rate sensitivity study I came here to do. But before that ship can sail, I need to (further) train the marketers and loan officers, requisition a color printer and ink for flyers and then print them, convince the management team that everything is going exactly according to plan so they can just lazily wave the thing on, pitch a couple slight changes in operating procedures, and requisition two desktop computers for the loan officers to use. Incredibly, it appears that this may be within reach.

So it has been a busy two days thus far, and the rest of the week should follow suit. By Friday I probably will have forgotten all about Belgian brews and the people I care about. Just kidding. Lest I create the impression that noses are being scraped up on the grindstone, let me relay two scenes from today.

SORRY--DUE TO THE EXISTENCE OF FILTERS (THANKS, GOOGLE) I HAVE BEEN ADVISED TO BE CAREFUL ABOUT WRITING, MENTIONING NAMES, ETC. SO THESE FEW PARAGRAPHS HAVE BEEN REMOVED. HERE IN ACCRA EVERYTHING IS GOING GREAT AND EVERYONE I ENCOUNTER (ESPECIALLY THOSE I ENCOUNTER IN MY CAPACITY AS AN EMPLOYEE) IS ABSOLUTELY FANTASTIC. IF YOU WANT ANY MORE INFORMATION THAN THAT, YOU'LL HAVE TO ASK VIA PRIVATE EMAIL. CHEERS!

Yes, back in the saddle. Honestly, five days in (I started this entry Tuesday night; now it’s Thursday) it feels good. It’s easy to get lost in the days, in the mad jumble of sensations and events, in the unintentional comedy. At the moment I’m reminded of my favorite Bright Eyes lyric: “Oh! My morning’s coming back; the whole world’s waking up. The city buses swimming past, I’m happy just because I found out I am really no one.”