23/9 and 24/9: Business visits

Today we went to the Riverside group and gave them their new loans. One of the women, Hadija,  had asked us to find a price for a scale, but this time she said she wanted to buy sardines instead so it is a bit difficult to be sure that they invest in what they put on their applications for the loan. We also visited Hadija’s shop and there is a lot of space left for stock. There was also a woman who came in asking for soap, Hadija didn’t have any and made a call. Less than ten minutes later a guy came with a box full of soap. But either way most of the women seem to benefit a great deal from the loans. In the afternoon I had a Swahili lesson, so we are down to 41,5 hours now, I want a lot of lessons this week and during the weekend so I won’t be so stressed during my last weeks in Arusha. But we’ll see. As the others were still on their safari I had a quiet day when I came back from the office and I started writing all of my Swahili into a new book where it can all be at once. On Tuesday we went out to Tengeru as usual, first to the Tupendane group. With them we did forecasting and planning training and Clementina, the chairwoman of the group, came up with the idea that for next time they should all come with a business plan that we can look over and see what would be most profitable. In the afternoon we visited the Ikusura group, we also asked them to come up with business plans for next week. Then we visited a woman called Helena she has many things, animals, vegetables, fruits, chicken and a shop. In her shop she pays 40,000 for an employee a month that she also supplies with food worth 45,000 a month, her rent is 30,000 and for electricity she pays 5,000 per month. She told us that the income in her shop is 120,000 a month. This did not seem profitable to us, but as her bookkeeping books were apparently locked away somewhere we could not check it. After I got back I was meeting with Camille, Freja, Laura and a new member to our Zanzibar group; Sofie, to plan a bit more and change dates for some hotels and of course add one more person. I was about one hour late as the visit to Helena’s house had been longer than I thought it would, but we got everything done and now we are just missing a place to stay in Dar, as we can’t get hold of the place we wanted to stay.