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Friday, 01 July 2011

Transition to Blogger.com

I have discovered Xanga to have become even more un-user friendly than the last time I blogged (10 months), so I'm switching to Blogger.com. For all subsequent posts, please visit: http://chartouche.blogspot.com.

Thursday, 05 August 2010

TEDxCinemaNairobi

One of the highlights of living in Nairobi has been TEDxCinemaNairobi - Saturday mornings from 10:30 am to Noon, at the movie theater at Westgate Mall in Westlands. They show 2-3 TED talks, followed by a 20-minute discussion. Each week, there's a different theme, this week's being "Human Behavior: Our irrational consumerism, what drives it, and how it affects our minds, societies and the earth."

The two films we watched were: 1) "The Story of Stuff", a 20-minute film (not a TED talk) showing the vicious cycle of consumerism, from the environmental devastation resulting from mass production to the marketing of perceived obsolescence, and 2) "The Art of Choosing", a TED talk sharing Sheena Iyengar's research on how freedom of choice varies across cultures.

The two films and the subsequent discussion led me to think a lot about my own life and the choices that I make. I'm not really referring to the materialistic choices underscored in "The Story of Stuff", but rather the life choices that forever shape our lives.

I am grateful beyond words to my parents who immigrated from Taiwan to the US back in 1971 so that my sisters and I would have as many opportunities as possible, with particular respect to education. And indeed, I feel that I have always had an endless supply of wonderful life choices. Not if I could go to college, but which one. Not whether I would be employed after graduation, but by which company. And when the time comes, not an arranged marriage, but one for love. Yet, I see in my own life and others in my generation a tendency to experience not only analysis paralysis, but ironic unhappiness that can sometimes accompany too many choices. When there are too many options, it can be painful to choose because we may always wonder if we made the "right" decision, the "best" decision. When in reality, I think we should just be thankful that we have the freedom to choose at all, and that life is a precious gift that must be, well, lived as such, regardless of the could've, should've, would've's.

I also started thinking about the freedom of choice with respect to international development. Most of foreign aid and NGO work is about delivering services such as food, health, and education to the base of the pyramid. I am not criticizing *what* is being given to the poor, but rather *how*. Often, we Westerners have an attitude of "we know best" and assume that we're giving the poor what they "need". But what do they want? This is why I chose to focus my career on economic development - access to money alone is not enough, but it can significantly empower the poor to make choices for themselves.

Saturday, 12 June 2010

BarCamp Nairobi 2010

Today I attended my first BarCamp, in Nairobi, no less. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the concept of a "BarCamp," it's basically an un-conference, user-driven in the sense that attendees volunteer to give presentations, and sessions are scheduled based on popular demand. BarCamp Nairobi was hosted at iHub and iLAB, and featured a variety of innovative organizations/initiatives, many of which were new to me.

iHub: "Nairobi’s Innovation Hub for the technology community! It’s an open space for the technologists, investors, tech companies and hackers in the area. This space is a tech community facility with a focus on young entrepreneurs, web and mobile phone programmers and designers. It is part open community workspace (co-working), part vector for investors and VCs and part incubator." Not to be confused with The Hub, but similar theme of shared workspace for collaboration and innovation.

NAILAB: "The NAILAB (iLAB) is an ICT Business Incubation Laboratory. NAILAB, shortened from Nairobi Incubation Laboratory, incubates ICT-based or ICT-heavy start-ups and SMEs. The NAILAB offers an incubation platform to help young entrepreneurs to concentrate on building a business structure around their innovations without the need of a high initial capital to secure office space and the accompanying services."
FabLabs: Apparently there are 40 fabrication laboratories borne out of MIT, but located all over the globe, two of which are in Kenya (Nairobi and a rural village in western Kenya). The basic premise of Fab Labs is to provide inventors with computer-controlled tools such as laser cutters and circuit board milling machines to conduct rapid prototyping to "make almost anything." The speaker gave the example of a man who invented a chai machine that, once triggered by a mere phone call, manages to mix a cup of tea, hot water, milk, and sugar by the time he arrives home from work, a la Wallace and Gromit's Cracking Contraptions.
Ushahidi: An open-source platform for crowdsourcing crisis response. "The Ushahidi Platform allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, email or web and visualize it on a map or timeline. Our goal is to create the simplest way of aggregating information from the public for use in crisis response." Ushahidi instances have tracked everything from the 2008 post-election violence in Kenya to swine flu incidence across the globe to post-earthquake crisis response in Haiti.
Map Kibera: An online map created by residents of Kibera, Africa's 2nd largest slum. Community members have marked key points of interest ranging from schools and churches to water points and health clinics.
Voices of Africa for Sustainable Development: An NGO whose mission is to empower impoverished women and youth to improve their communities sustainably through the use of innovative and cutting edge information and communications technology and fair trade income generation. One of the initiatives they implement are solar-powered rural internet kiosks.
AkiraChix: A group to facilitate communication and collaboration between girls and women interested in technology. Having been one of only a few female Computer Science majors in my class, I'm all about encouraging young women to pursue careers in IT!
I am constantly inspired by what a hotspot Nairobi has become for ICTD, social entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurship in general. The level of passion and innovation in this community gives me hope for the rapid economic development of Kenya and hopefully more countries within Africa!

Monday, 12 April 2010

Kibera: A view into another side of Nairobi

On the final day of the Microcredit Summit, a number of us signed up for field visits hosted by local microfinance institutions. My Haas classmate Kris, his fiancée Flavia, who was also attending the conference, and I visited Kibera, the second largest slum in Africa. Our first stop was the main office of Jamii Bora (Swahili for “good families”), a microfinance institution that started in the slums with 50 members and has grown to over 170,000 members in less than eight years. For some inspiring stories of how Jamii Bora has helped change lives, check out: http://www.jamiibora.org/membersvoices.htm.

Photos taken from the rooftop of a Jamii Bora apartment building:

Photos of the market, including a woman who uses her Jamii Bora loans as working capital for the cloth stand that she operates:


Kris took some really nice panoramic shots of this view of Kibera, but since my camera’s not as fancy, this is the best I can do:

Sunday, 11 April 2010

Africa-Middle East Regional Microcredit Summit
From April 7-10, I attended the Africa-Middle East Regional Microcredit Summit along with over 2000 people from over 40 countries, including practitioners from countless microfinance institutions, intermediaries, students, and Nobel Laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus himself (seated third from the right):
The theme of Day 1 was “A Vision for the Future of Microfinance in Africa and the Middle East”, the theme of Day 2 was “Using Microfinance to Improve the Environment and Agriculture,” and the theme of Day 3 was “Using Microfinance as a Platform to Achieve Breakthroughs in Health and Well-Being.” In general, the conference provided a good overview of some of the main issues faced by the microfinance industry and a forum for local, regional, and global organizations to present their respective solutions and innovations to increase the access of credit, savings, and non-financial services at the bottom of the pyramid. However, even the workshop sessions were too large to truly delve into and discuss details. Below I have highlighted some very basic takeaways as I design and pilot KickStart's layaway and microcredit services:
- Microfinance institutions (MFIs) are increasingly diversifying their portfolio of products to include non-financial services such as access to health, education, clean water & sanitation, and micro-insurance.
  - As offering these services usually falls beyond their core competency, MFIs often seek partnerships with public- and private-sector providers of non-financial services.
- MFIs are increasingly expanding their services to include a micro-savings component, which provides borrowers with protected and/or emergency funds at the same time that it provides MFIs with a relatively low cost of capital.
- Technology firms have increasingly specialized in providing MFIs with customized back-office Management Information Systems and customer-facing solutions to decrease the transaction costs of loan disbursement and repayment (i.e. mobile banking).
- I spoke with a number of microfinance organizations with whom we may want to consider partnership based on characteristics such as:
  - Shared focus on serving the rural poor à distribution network in rural areas
  - Agricultural loan products/services designed for smallholder farmers
  - Financing loans for water-related assets (e.g. irrigation systems, water tanks, etc.)
  - Established mobile banking system (e.g. M-PESA)
There were also two enormous exhibition tents outside the conference center, and KickStart set up a booth alongside a myriad of microfinance organizations: