Putting learned skills into practice at WAT SACCO

For a microfinance cooperative, members’ savings is the best source of funds because it is free. When a SACCO can finance its lending operations without having to borrow from banks or having to be subsidized by any one of the thousands of NGOs out there, it is much more autonomous. Not to mention it is much better for development purposes since the money stays in the local community.

While we get offers everyday from NGOs wanting to give us money, in many SACCOs we actually have excess liquidity. One of my mandates here is to help Dunduliza network better manage its excess liquidity (extra cash). About 6 months ago, a study was done by a DID consultant, which pointed out that our network had a lot of excess cash lying in bank accounts earning little return. It also proposed a plan to optimize liquidity management. My job, for the short while that I am here, is to help move this plan along by putting words into action.

Today, my specific challenge was to convince the board members of WAT SACCO, to pilot test internet banking. WAT SACCO is an urban cooperative in Dar Es Salaam and is probably one of the best managed SACCOs in our network. Internet banking could be very beneficial for them. For instance, it would enable the manager to monitor the balance daily for increased control, transfer funds between accounts from her desk, print statements for free and decrease transaction costs. Now although everybody living in modern societies use internet banking for both personal and business purposes, here internet banking is very new, only available in certain banks and people are unconvinced of its advantages. Not to mention that the SACCO doesn’t even have internet.

My boss Claude and I arrived at the meeting specially convened for us and met the board members. This felt like a case competition I did at school, except that this one was no game. We had to convince the board to switch banks, get internet and register to internet banking and all this had to be agreed before my departure in March. The head of the board was Mama Siwale and she is one tough lady! The 6 people around the table were to be the judging panel. The first thing I did was go around and shake everybody’s hand and present myself. The board members also introduced themselves, but their names were so long and complicated that I could not even pronounce or memorize them.

I had prepared two power point presentations, an informative one on internet banking and another one to convince them of the benefits of liquidity centralization (our long term objective). The second presentation was structured true case class style, with an opportunity Statement, current situation, decision matrix and implementation plan. Prof. Donovan would have been proud, although I personally thought I could have done much better.

The presentations with questions lasted 2 hours. In those 2 hours I tried to be as clear and persuasive as possible, but a lot of questions were raised. Some of them I could answer easily, but there were some unexpected ones. Mama Siwale was really no BS and always went straight to the point. In the end, Claude thought it went well, but I am more critical and still have some doubts. Hopefully before I leave, I will know whether I would have succeeded or whether there will still be some convincing work to do.

I realized that convincing people to invest time and money into a new, unknown technology is no easy feet! One thing is certain, although in school we would convince multinationals to buy out other companies, to develop revolutionizing new products or to expand their operations into China, this experience, as tiny as it was, was a good way to put those skills into practice in the real business world.