One of the more innovative organizations I met with in Malawi was an NGO called The Story Workshop. They used the radio as a way of raising awareness on a variety of social and cultural issues, including gender-based violence (GBV), which led me to their office situated a short drive from the center of Blantyre. The Story Workshop utilizes the local village and area development committees (VDCs and ADCs) to form “community listening clubs” to which they distribute free radios. In a country with 35.9% illiteracy and the majority of families unable to afford a TV, radio is the most effective mode of mass communication. The Story Workshop employs writers and producers to create dramas based on actual situations gathered by project officers who make regular visits to the communities. “Actual situations” include, for example, cases of husbands abusing their wives; sexual harrassment of young school girls by male teachers; or young women forced into prostitution, early pregnancy, and often disease due to economic circumstance. I was interested in the content, and costs, of such a program for my job; but I was more intrigued by the concept. A very simple and powerful one. Use “real-life” stories to convey a message, raise awareness, and create meaning… hmmm… sounds familiar.
So I tell you that story to tell you this story.
The other focus group discussion I held was with a group of older women just outside of Blantyre, mostly widows in their 40s and 50s, who had been trained and received microfinance loans to start their own businesses from a Malawian organization called the National Association of Business Women (NABW). They were entrepreneurs of small businesses ranging from selling mandazis and doughnuts to raising cattle for dairy to buying staples such as cooking oil, sugar, and salt wholesale in town and then selling them individually in their own communities. My questions revolved mainly around the specifics of the business training they received, how they utilized and interacted with the “market” in Blantyre, how their lives had improved and changed since starting their own businesses, and the major challenges they faced, as entrepreneurs, as women, and as women entrepreneurs. One of the biggest challenges the women spoke of was now being considered the “breadwinner” in their family and having to provide for more than just their own children, including sisters, nieces, nephews, cousins, and orphans. The profits of their small businesses were supposed to help lift them out of extreme poverty but instead were being stretched thin across needy, but often demanding, family members. “It’s our culture,” Sophie, the project officer for NABW told me. 
A sign I saw hanging in a house just outside of Eldoret last year while making home visits to families caring for orphans. Telling, very telling.
A couple weeks later, I’m cooking dinner in Eldoret, Kenya with my two very good friends Ken and Samuel. Samuel is a high school teacher who lives with his wife Regina, a nurse, and their two month old baby. Samuel comes from a family of 11 and Regina from a family of 7. Of the 18 sibling in those two families, Samuel and Regina are the first to graduate from college. And because of it, they are the first all their siblings turn to in times of need. A teacher and a nurse make a modest living in the States, and make just as modest a living in Kenya. But to their family members… they are educated, they have stable, professional jobs, and they are more or less perceived as being wealthy. “I thought with the new baby, they would back off a bit,” Samuel told me. “But no,” he laughs. “We are trying to save, have future expenses to think about, such as his education, medical bills.” He sighs, and chuckles, “It’s the African way.”
“Africa’s communal culture” appears to be a double-edged sword.
