Category: Business

Economic freedom for refugees: The Ugandan model

Refugees from South Sudan wait to board trucks to the Nyumanzi Resettlement Camp in Uganda on January 26 2014. (Pic: AFP)

When a team from Oxford University’s Humanitarian Innovation Project set out to explore what work refugees and asylum seekers in Uganda had managed to find, they were struck by the breadth and scale of businesses they were engaged in – from being café owners to vegetable sellers, to farmers growing maize on a commercial scale, millers, restaurateurs, transporters and traders in fabrics and jewellery.

With the number of the world’s displaced having now passed the 50-million mark and rising, debates are intensifying over how this many people can be supported. Alexander Betts and his team wanted to see whether it was realistic, and politically acceptable, to encourage refugees to be more self-sufficient.

Uganda has a relatively liberal policy towards its 387 000 refugees and asylum-seekers, most of whom have fled conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and South Sudan. Uganda does not have refugee camps as such, but most live in designated refugee settlements where there are allocated plots of land to farm. They can, however, get permission to live outside these settlements if they think they can support themselves, and Kampala in particular has a sizeable refugee population.

Betts told Irin: “Uganda is a relatively positive case in that it allows the right to work and a significant degree of freedom of movement. That isn’t to say that it’s perfect, but it’s definitely towards the positive end of the spectrum. The reason we chose it is that it shows what’s possible when refugees are given basic economic freedoms.”

His team spoke to more than 1 500 households in Kampala and in two rural settlements – Nakivale in the south, and Kyangwali on the DRC border. The families were registered with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) as refugees, but that did not mean that they all received humanitarian assistance. In Kampala 78% of refugee households receive no assistance at all from UNHCR or any other agency. Even in the refugee settlements, 17% of households receive no assistance, and even where families do get help they are unlikely to be fully dependent on aid, since UNHCR gives food rations for a maximum of five years, unless the refugees are designated as vulnerable.

So what do they do instead? They farm, certainly, in and around the rural settlements. Around half the Congolese, Rwandan and South Sudanese refugees the researchers talked to there had plots of their own, and others worked as farm labourers. Only the Somalis showed little or no interest in farming.

Not just subsistence farming
Ugandan crop buyers come regularly to the settlements, and take truckloads of produce from Kyangwali to the market town of Hoima. The researchers spoke to a trader in Hoima who said he bought around 500 tonnes of maize and beans from the refugee farmers last year, some 60% of his stock. He sold the maize on to other parts of Uganda, but also further afield, to Tanzania and South Sudan.

Now the farmers in Kyangwali are trying to cut out the middlemen and take their crops directly to market, through a co-operative with more than 500 members, including some Ugandan farmers from local villages. Kyangwali Progressive Farmers is registered as a limited company, and has started getting contracts to supply produce directly to manufacturers.

Kagoma weekly market in the Kyangwali refugee settlement in Uganda. (Pic: IRIN/RSC)

The research uncovered another substantial trading network with refugees at its centre – in this case Congolese refugees who were doing business in jewellery and printed cloth, known as bitenge. They buy from Ugandan wholesalers in Kampala, and sell, not just in the refugee settlements but also to Ugandan customers in nearby towns. Some also engage in cross-border trade, taking their wares into Kenya and South Sudan.

The picture which emerges is of a very “connected” economy, with refugees using their networks of contacts among fellow refugees and in their countries of origin to do business. But they also trade with their Ugandan neighbours, work in Ugandan enterprises and – when they prosper – create employment both for their countrymen and members of the host community.

A lesson for other countries?
The picture is a generally positive one, but not every country chooses to allow its refugees such economic freedom. Governments worry that if they are making a good living where they are, they will never go home, although Betts points out that when the time does come to leave, it is a lot easier to repatriate someone who has been busy and active and developed their skills, than someone who has spent years surviving on food rations in a refugee camp.

Successful refugees can also generate resentment in local populations. Uganda has remained generally tolerant, unlike neighbouring Kenya, where there has been a backlash against Somali refugees following a series of al-Shabab attacks. Uganda has also suffered terrorist attacks, but says Betts, “for some reason, unlike Kenya, they haven’t been connected to refugees in the same way, perhaps because in Kenya politicians have started to use the refugee issue for political gain”.

So the situation in Uganda does very much depend on its local context. Even so, Betts and his team are convinced that their study has implications for refugee policy elsewhere, particularly for the new crisis in the Middle East. “The traditional response is to create camps,” he told Irin, “but we can’t afford to do this in places like Lebanon. The cost – the human cost in terms of the waste of potential, and the possibility of developing resentment and frustration – is just too high.

“We have to realise what refugees can contribute, and not just warehouse them in camps. We should start by recognising that long-term encampment is not an option, and that when they are allowed, human beings can do a lot for themselves.”

10 years ago

DR Congo’s tshukudu, the all-purpose transport scooter

What do you do when you need to deliver several hundred pounds of potatoes, 150 stalks of sugar cane, 30 eucalyptus saplings and eight sacks of coal, without motorised transport?

For residents of Goma, in the war-scarred east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the answer to this, and many other problems, is the tshukudu.

A local but highly efficient tradition, the man-powered wooden scooters are everywhere on the paved highways and dusty sidestreets of Goma, holding their own with the motorcycle taxis.

A man with his tshukudu in Goma on June 19 2014. (Pic: AFP)

They’re operated by a group of 1 500 proud, often burly men who not only have their own union but saw a giant, gold-coloured statue erected in their honour a few years ago in this capital of North Kivu province, on the border with Rwanda.

“The tshukudu is our whole life,” said driver Damas Sibomana.

Their vehicles, pronounced “chookoodoo”, measure about two metres long, have wide handlebars and a raised front wheel. They balance improbably large loads, as the tshukudeurs – as the drivers are known – push their vehicles along almost as much as they “drive” them.

Many drivers live outside the city and their day begins by transporting agricultural products grown in the verdant hills to the north, which feed the city’s markets. The good news? It’s downhill.

Once in the city centre the drivers await further orders for deliveries or return, again fully loaded, back to their starting point.

Men transport goods on tshukudus, wooden push-bikes, in Goma on June 18 2014. (Pic: AFP)

Jean-Marie Firiki gets up at 4am but his descent stops in Kibumba, 30 kilometres to the north of Goma, which boasts of being the tshukudu’s birthplace. The 35-year-old works as a tshukudeur at dawn and builds the machines during the day.

“A decent tshukudu costs $50 (36 euros),” Firiki said, “but the cost of a beautiful one can be $80-100” – quite a sum in DR Congo, where the majority of people live in extreme poverty.

But the boon is no fuel costs, and driver Sibomana says they can earn $10 on a good day.

There are no machines in the workshop that Fikiri shares with other craftsmen. Like most of the country Kibumba has no electricity supply. The men work the wood – here it’s eucalyptus – with a handsaw, a chisel, a plane and some sandpaper. It takes two days for a craftsman to make one scooter.

Invented in 1973
Paulin Barasiza works next to Fikiri. The 52-year-old traces the invention of the tshukudu back to about 1973.

Our fathers would sell potatoes and tobacco at a Rwandan market several kilometres away, he said. “They used wheelbarrows but these where inefficient. This is where the design came from” – inspired by bicycles.

The first tshukudus were made entirely of wood and the wheels were greased with palm oil several times a day to keep their gears from seizing up.

Sales began to pick up in the late 1980s but the decades that followed have been marred by inter-ethnic violence and regional conflicts that would ravage Kivu and still mark the province today.

It was paradoxically during this dark period that the tshukudu experienced significant upgrades: old tires glued on to protect the wheels, metal hubs and bearings and the addition of springs to aid steering.

Today, tshukudus cover vast distances and can carry up to half a tonne. Some models have a brake that works by applying friction to the rear wheel.

When a big load needs transporting to Goma, Sibomana employs two our three extra drivers for the day. Solidarity is strong, and thanks to help from other tshukudeurs, he was able to buy a field and a plot of land where he is building a house.

In early evening after a hard day’s work the scooter takes on another role: courting. The roads are full of young drivers taking their girlfriends out for a ride, both standing on the tshukudu as the man, in back, scoots it along.

The profession is held in high esteem. To have a daughter marry a tshukudeur means she “will not die of hunger”, said local historian Dany Kayeye.

10 years ago

Lessons from Rwanda’s female-run institutions

An MP listens to UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon speak at the Rwandan Parliament building on January 29 2008, in Kigali. (Pic: AFP)

Friday 4 July: Independence Day. There will be speeches, celebrations and fireworks. But these celebrations will be taking place on the other side of the world from the US, because on Friday, the central African country of Rwanda will mark its own Liberation Day.

It is 20 years since the end of the genocide that saw the deaths of more than 800 000 people. Since 1994, Rwanda has worked hard to create a peaceful state and among those enjoying the fireworks will be female parliamentarians from around the world, who are meeting in Rwanda this week to discuss how to get more women into every country’s Parliament.

For this is Rwanda’s big success story. It has the distinction of being the only country in the world with more female MPs than male ones, a statistic that has attracted a good deal of international attention, not least from the Zurich-based Women in Parliaments organisation, set up last year, which this week is holding its summer summit in the Rwandan capital, Kigali.

Not surprisingly, many of those attending the conference are keen to find out how Rwanda has managed to reach the figure of 64% women in its Parliament, which is unheard-of everywhere else. Worldwide, women still represent under a quarter (21.9%) of all elected parliamentary seats, but in Rwanda the post-genocide situation, in which 70% of the country’s remaining population was female, and the introduction of quotas requiring 30% of political and government candidates to be women, have brought about real change, in national and local politics and across public positions. Half the country’s 14 supreme court justices are women, for instance. Boys and girls now attend compulsory primary and secondary school in equal numbers, and new laws enable women to own and inherit property.

But this is not just about numbers. The rebuilding of Rwanda’s public bodies was driven by a number of senior women determined that women’s gains in senior positions would not be lost as the gender balance gradually began to adjust. They include Donatille Mukabalisa, the speaker of the Rwandan chamber of deputies, who has been pushing reform over the past two decades. Mukabalisa, whose keynote speech opened the conference on Tuesday, has said that while the quota system clearly helped speed up women’s participation in politics, women appointed and elected to a whole range of public positions have been so successful in making a positive difference that the country may reach a point where quotas are unnecessary.

There are other lessons to be learned from the country’s rebuilding process. One of those is about handling disputes, and the need to increase the participation of women in post-conflict societies.

The middle day of the conference has been set aside for field trips, to see more about the real lives of women other than society’s leaders. It’s an astute move, for behind the headlines is anxiety about the reality of life for ordinary women in the country. One Rwandan women’s rights campaigner has described the female parliamentarians in Rwanda as like a “lovely vase of flowers in a living room” – decorative but not a huge amount of use.

There are concerns about violence: the government’s own figures from 2010 show that two in five women reported suffering physical violence at least once since the age of 15. And many public services in the country are sparse. Rwanda’s first state speech and language therapy service was set up only this year at the Rwanda Military Hospital, with support from a volunteer UK speech and language therapist.

But Rwanda certainly provides a useful lesson for UK politicians. The Conservative party, which has failed to increase the number of female MPs in the party from a dismal 16%, is now seriously considering all-women shortlists. The Liberal Democrats, with an even worse figure of just 13% female MPs, and even the Labour party, with 33% female MPs, might also want to take note.

• Jane Dudman is chairing a session on the impact of female parliamentarians on the UN’s post-2015 millennium development goals at the Women in Parliaments’ summer summit in Kigali.

10 years ago

Sending money to Somalia: The remittance economy

(Pic: Flickr)

Some of my oldest memories as a child are of sunny weekend mornings eating canjeero, staring wide-eyed at my parents as they yelled into the receiver. That’s how you knew they were talking to relatives back home. The amplitudes of their voices would let us know right away they were on a long distance call. My brothers and I would always laugh at the faces they made when the connection was particularly bad. They winced and yelled and repeated the same sentences over and over and we, being nothing but the goofy children we were, found their facial expressions, their repetitions hilarious.

They would ask so-and-so if they had received their money, would inform their siblings or cousins how much would go to whom. Some was intended for so-and-so’s schooling, this part would go to grandmother, and this fraction to another aunt or uncle. Education was paid for, healthcare, rent, you name it. I still watch them go through the same routine.

I remember walking to Western Union with my father as a child; the Ghanaian clerk still works there. It is not a Western Union anymore, the banners changed more than once the past few years but if one thing stays the same, it was going to that office and getting that money transferred. The companies changed but the people stay; bills still need to get paid.

I remember telling my father he had to introduce me to the relatives I had yet to meet, by phone now and in person eventually. I remember looking up at him and saying, in that serious manner children adopt when they believe what they are saying is of utmost importance: “If you die, I will have to send them that money, but how would I know who to send it to?”

I hardly remember his exact words, but I recall his loud laugh, his hand on my head and him telling me that there are no ‘ifs’ but ‘whens’; that I would meet everyone eventually; and that I needed to worry about that French homework in front of me, not the bills of my incalculable number of relatives.

Every now and then there’s a new name. some are feeling the effects of the drought; a relative living in an affected area is calling right this moment.

It is a 20 minute drive to the place. For years now my parents have been dealing with the same Somali woman and the money transfer company she works for. Money exchanges hands, a text message is sent, a phone call is made. A day or two later a call to relatives; a confirmation.

This reality is not ours alone. I am 20 now and realising how, for the past two decades, Somalia has heavily relied on remittances in order to sustain herself. That with conflict and political instability, money transfers from the diaspora directly to the intended recipients has become more reliable than incomes garnered from economic institutions on ground; and remittance money has not only become the main source of individual/household sustenance, but also contributes to investment.

A post on the World Bank blog asked if Somalia could survive without its remittance. For most people, when they think of the country, the images that come to mind are of pirates or face-covered al-Shabab fighters brandishing automatic weapons and a black flag, or of malnourished victims of drought and poverty.

That however, is not a full picture. Other than livestock, Somalia’s (albeit largely informal) economy is based on remittances and telecommunications. Until very recently Somalia lacked a central bank and even now it isn’t as strong an institution as it should be. What kept the country together after the outbreak of the civil war, in terms of effective monetary management, are those many remittance transferring companies, which have been and still are the main financial industry relied upon.

The country is slowly rebuilding. infrastructures are popping up; in some areas expats are moving back; the government has regained control of regions which had been for a long time under the grip of extremist fighters. And this doesn’t mean that remittance money has been dwindling; rather it has been and still is financing the latest developments the private sector has been undertaking.

According to Ifad (the UN’s International Funds for Agricultural Development), remittances flowing into the African continent reach close to $40 US billion. When it comes to the Somali diaspora, about $1.6-billion is sent yearly to the country, and contributes to various vital fields, from education to healthcare to basic necessities such as food and shelter.

Read Remittance ‘supertax’ costs Africa $1.8bn a year

However, it all isn’t picture perfect. Recently, as more light was shed on the exorbitant fees imposed on remittance money sent to Africa, “leading money transfer companies” have come under scrutiny. Many are realising, and talking about, the fact that “the African Diaspora is being charged twice the global average” to send money home. The Somali central bank is now in its fifth year of existence after its destruction and optimists might say that once it gets on its feet, it could in the future set policies and regulations which would eventually lead to the establishment of reliable banks.

Sumaya Ugas is an undergraduate student at McGill University. She studies International Development and Political Sciences. A lover of words, she is constantly carrying a novel (or three) and writing. This post was first published on Rise Africa, a blog written by a group of individuals who seek to create an atmosphere that encourages conversation between Africans on the continent and in the diaspora. Connect with them on Twitter: @riseafrica

10 years ago

Organic farm in Benin looks to set example for Africa

With his pilgrim’s staff and panama hat, Father Godfrey Nzamujo nips up and down the paths of Songhai, the organic farm he created nearly 30 years ago to fight poverty and rural migration in Africa.

The small farm covered barely a hectare when it was set up in Porto Novo in 1985 but has since become a pilot project for the rest of the continent badly in need of new ideas to maximise yields.

The centre in Benin’s capital now stretches over 24 hectares and employs an army of workers and apprentices, who toil from sunrise to sunset growing fruit, vegetables and rice, as well as rearing fish, pigs, poultry.

“Nothing is wasted, everything is transformed” according to Nzamujo’s principle, with even chicken droppings turned into the bio-gas that powers the centre’s kitchens.

Father Godfrey Nzamujo, director of Centre Songhai. (Pic: AFP)

Songhai in tiny Benin has big plans for Africa. It already has similar operations in Nigeria, Liberia and Sierra Leone and wants to set up shop in 13 more west and central African countries.

Nzamujo’s raison d’etre is how to help Africans increase yields through simple techniques, without using pesticides or fertilizers, and while cutting production costs and protecting the environment.

The Nigeria-born priest, who was raised in California on the US west coast, said he was shocked by the appalling images of famine in Africa on television at the start of the 1980s.

He then left to discover the continent to see how he could put to good use his university training in agronomics, economics and information technology and fight against poverty on his own terms.

How it began
After visiting a number of countries, he ended up in Benin where the country’s then-Marxist government gave him a small plot.

“It was abandoned land, killed by chemical fertiliser and conventional agricultural practices. It didn’t work,” he told AFP.

“There were seven of us. We dug wells and watered with our own hands. And during the main dry season, this grey surface became green,” he recalled with a smile.

Nzamujo’s secret is in imitating nature, encouraging “good bacteria” present in the soil to maximise production without having to rely on chemicals.

Yields at Songhai speak for themselves: the farm produces seven tonnes of rice per hectare three times a year, up from one tonne per hectare once a year at the beginning of the project.

“Songhai is facing up to the triple challenge of Africa today: poverty, environment and youth employment,” said Nzamujo proudly.

The cleric’s system centres on local production and distribution, creating economic activity to tackle poverty head on.

At Songhai, jam simmers in large pots while chickens are roasted and soya oil, rice and fruit juice are packaged for sale in the centre’s shop or served at its restaurant.

Discarded parts of agricultural machinery are reused to create ingenious contraptions and used water is filtered using water hyacinths.

A man wheels coconuts in a wheelbarrow at the Centre Songhai. (Pic: AFP)

The centre also has an internet point and even a bank so that local people can avoid going into the city centre.

Youth employment is encouraged and some 400 farm apprentices – selected by competition – are trained every year. The 18-month course is entirely free.

Apprentices, interns
Paul Okou is one of them. The 25-year-old from Parakou, northern Benin, would like to follow his parents into farming but is hoping to work in a more profitable way.

“My parents use traditional, archaic methods while at Songhai we learn the modern way, albeit makeshift,” he said.

“What we used to do in two days now we do in two hours.”

The apprentices are sent into villages where they apply what they have learned. Once in charge of a farm, they join the Songhai network and are checked regularly.

Songhai also welcomes interns who are paying for their own training.

They include Abua Eucharia Nchinor, a Nigerian in his 30s, and Kemajou Nathanael, a 39-year-old former salesman from Cameroon, who both want to open an organic farm in their respective countries.

According to Nzamujo, Songhai is not a cure-all for Africa’s problems but tackles their root causes.

“Imagine if all the young people who hang around big cities did their training here and we equip them. … Imagine the productivity of Africa today.” he said.

Cecile de Comarmond for AFP