2019-07-27

Fri 26. July: Fatumas shop and Kariakoo

We spent a fascinating morning with Fatuma in Kigamboni, on the southern side of Daressalaam harbour. She is the wife of Menas Yapesa (the TSS agent of Bahats TBM in Msowero). Every morning early at sunrise she starts to make small sweet rice-cakes over a charcoal fire in a little stall in a side street of Kigamboni. Her cakes are famous, so people even walk quite far to come and buy them each morning for their breakfast. This is her business. And she wants to expand. Bahat wanted to understand the situation on site to assess the chances of Fatuma maybe becoming a “BOP-outlet”. That means a food outlet that sells to “Bottom-of-the-Pyramid” consumers in the cities. While those people have low and often very low incomes, their numbers are huge, and so the combined market of all these people also is huge. But one can only touch that market, if one can daily provide such low-income customers the goods they need where they live, and at prices they can afford. That is quite a challenge, and TBM wants to take it up. So Fatuma could become such a BOP outlet? Starting as a small restaurant that then also sells beans and maize flour etc. over the counter? Yes, it looks good. And she is keen to try something. So we opened the bag we brought from Lucy in Makambako, in which we had put Lucy’s 1kg-packets of clean and dry beans and wheat from the southern highlands. Fatuma immediately thought she could sell such products. And sure enough, there was immediate interest among her customers, particularly because she wanted to sell those beans at the same price like the normal uncleaned beans. But can this work out economically? We took out the TSS registration form for the beans that Lucy was packaging in Makambako, and entered a price at 10% below what Fatuma wanted to sell. And we also entered the price for sending such a bag on a truck from Makambako to Dar (Lucy knows everything about how to arrange that). And sure enough, even if we enter those figures, there is still a commission for TBM and there is still a bonus for farmers in Ibumi who grew the beans, and Fatuma still makes a margin of 10%. So, it looks like this is feasible! Let’s try: I immediately agreed this can be a new FARIP experiment to make a few cycles of small deliveries to Fatuma to see how this goes, and whether it works out economically. Once we see the real figures, it can become an official TBM TSS deal with COB advance funding etc. So, typical FARIP: Their idea looks like it could work, so go ahead and try it out in a very small way to learn the details and the right figures, and FARIP will cover the costs for the experiment. But it has to be well documented so we can learn the real issues. We will do it!
Then to Kariakoo market in central Dar. Aaah… Kariakoo! At first sight an incredible and colourful chaos of traffic and stalls and shops heaped with goods, packed with people and vehicles. Somehow this chaos works. I have no clue why and how, and probably nobody really can tell why it works. I suspect it is partly because of the inherent patience among people. They will not get upset overmuch when something happens that doesn’t fit their intentions. People readily accomodate each other and give each other a lot of leeway within a set of informal rules. So things work out. Incredible! And yes, the economy is humming, at least at that level!
Then back to work and debriefing with Bahat: Hardcore work on Excel sheets and calculations and scratching our heads about the operational arrangements, so that we move towards commercial viability on each venture we are following - or its failure from which we can learn. Bahat leaves us in the early morning, going back to Makambako, so we worked almost to midnight!
The rest of our stay will be more hardcore excels and calculations and conceptualization….. ah well…