Nick Wadhams

Piracy Musings Part 2

I often wonder about video piracy in Kenya, and particularly the fact that at Nairobi's many, many movie rental stores, the videos are always pirated. I have always assumed that the market is simply too small for anyone in international law enforcement to care that entrepreneurs here rent floor space and open businesses that advertise the fact that they are trafficking in pirated goods.

Suddenly, how odd! A video store now exists in Nairobi that rents out only legitimate movies. So people dying to see the new Transformers movie can get it at lots of places, but patrons of Mo Moviez (vision statement: "Quality Entertainment on your Desktop and at your Door Step; Original DVDS and Bluerays") will have to wait.

Friendly, Hygienic and Cheerful

One of the many things that continues to mystify me about Kenya is organizations' obsession with "mission statements" and "vision." For example, while visiting a government agency, you might come across a noticeboard stating the agency's vision in a sentence or so (usually, it's "to be the best X agency possible") and then its mission, which spells out in greater detail how it plans to achieve all that. This pointless claptrap is absolutely everywhere.

For example, the Pest Control Products Board helpfully tells us that its vision is to be "the leading regulatory agency for pest control products in the region." How many other regulatory agencies for pest control products are there in the region?

KEPHIS, the Kenyan Plant Health Inspectorate Serivce, whose name seems fairly self-explanatory informs us that is vision is to be "the lead regulatory agency in agriculture" (I wonder what the Agriculture Ministry might think of that! Smackdown!) and then double dips with a mission statement as well: "To provide an effective and efficient science-based regulatory service for assurance on quality of agricultural inputs and produce, thereby promoting sustainable economic growth and development."

The International School of Kenya: "Empowering students to create solutions for tomorrow's challenges". SCGIS Kenya (I don't even know what that is): "To serve, represent and network individuals using GIS for conservation in Kenya." Superfreight Kenya, which says on its web site that it handles "clearing and forwarding, shipping, export, air and sea cargo agents," comes in with this beaut: "To strive for excellence in all our endeavours and create an elaborate program to train our staff, looking after their welfare, and focusing on ethical practices to acquire credit in all we do on merit as a priority." BOO-YAH!

Today, I spotted the best one yet at Kengele's, a thoroughly enjoyable restaurant in Nairobi.

Now, this actually makes me less likely to go to Kengele's in the future. One ought to be slightly wary of any restaurant that says its mission is to be "hygienic" _ as if it recognizes that it's not quite there yet.

Kiva's Kenya Konundrum

Everybody loves Kiva, the do-gooding microlender to the poor. It would appear that some Kenyans love Kiva a little too much.

Kiva works pretty simply. You make a small loan to someone who needs a little cash. Kiva passes that money through a local field partner organization to the person you want to help. A look at Kiva's web page reveals that of 47 field partners in Africa, 11 are from Kenya. Five of those are active (though some have struggled to pay back their loans) and the other six are either paused or closed, mostly because of failure to repay their loans. That's something you might expect given the fact that many small businesses were ruined during Kenya's post-election violence.

Curiously, though, Kenya's post-election violence isn't the main reason for the trouble in Kenya's microfinance community. A closer look shows that four of the six programs were paused not because loan recipients could not pay back the money, but because the loan recipients never actually received their loans.

The worst of the bunch appears to have been an organization called SEED (Supporting Enterprises for Economic Development), which Kiva ended up taking to court for stealing its lenders' money. On its web site, Kiva says:

"Our efforts, in conjunction with SEED’s clients, led to the apprehension of SEED’s Executive Director by the Kenyan authorities. Despite what our lawyers felt was compelling evidence that Kiva funds had been stolen and a crime had been committed, the Kenyan criminal justice system did not bring formal charges against the Executive Director of SEED, and he was released."

Clamoring for condoms?

Civil society groups in Uganda have apparently been clamoring for the female condom, which was introduced through a U.N. Population Fund initiative 10 years ago but then abandoned. Now, UNFPA and the Ugandan government are bringing it back.

U.N. officials argue that they are reintroducing the female condom because civil society groups in Uganda want another weapon in the fight against HIV/AIDS. Difficult to argue with that. But is this really a good way to spend money? Lots of research now suggests that the blame for the spread of AIDS in Uganda lies not with prostitutes or those iconic truckers, but with regular people who often have more than one long-term partner.

So why is the U.N. spending its money on a potentially useless program? My sense from reporting this story was that for one thing, certain U.N. agencies are preoccupied with making sure they spend the money allotted to them; making sure the programs are viable is not so important.

The other depressing fact, as several people told me, is that small civil society groups cannot survive with outside funding. If they claim that women are demanding the female condom, they may be able to persuade international donors to launch a female-condom campaign and get a slice of the program money.

In this case, the stakes seem relatively low -- just 100,000 female condoms will be distributed in a one-year program. But it's a classic case of donors (with money to spend) and civil society (desperate for cash) pushing for something even though demand for it doesn't really exist.