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| Home | News & events | » Finalist in 2003 ICT Stories Competition |
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Finalist in the 2003 ICT Stories Competition/Tony Zeitoun awards | |
| "Hand Made In africa" a short story by Cordelia Salter-Nour, founder & webmaster, eShopafrica.com was selected as one of the twelve finalists in the 2003 ICT Stories/Tony Zeitoun awards Competition. Visit the ICT Stories website. | ||
| Stories had to be presented in four sections each of about 1,000 words in length. Details such as how ICT was used and what problems were faced had to be incorporated into the story. We'd like to know what you think... Let us know! | |
| "Hand Made in africa" by Cordelia Salter-Nour | |
| The idea | |
| "Made by hand". What does that mean to you? Maybe if you're an Italian you think of Fendi or Armani. Or from London and you think of Saville Row... and the price will tell you that in the worlds of industrialized manufacturing "hand-made" things command high, high prices. But if you're an artisan in africa your "hand-made" thing won't command a high price. you'll be made to feel inferior because your society never industrialized. Perceptions and economics will force you to accept a low price for your work and you may not be able to feed your family. When they get sick you won't be able to afford medicine and schools cost too much. You may not own or have the legal right to your house and may have no water. When your children grow they'll look down on you, move away, disassociate themselves from your traditions telling you you're living in a world they don't like. This is the scenario for traditional african artisans all over the continent and in this way centuries old skills are being lost.
In different times when african cultures and traditions were thriving there were domestic markets. In Ghana the asante kings and nobles would order kente cloth or "lost wax" brass beads for funerals, weddings, outdoorings and other special occasions. New designs would be ordered taxing the artisan's creativity. The weavers played an important role in a power structure where the visual impression of wealth was a mark of status. The greater the chief, the greater his cloth and the greater the weaver who made it. But not any more. the young asante nobles of today - just like all other young people - are more attracted to satellite TV and travel than to traditional arts and crafts. Given the choice between a new piece of kente cloth and a DVD player there's no question for them. Tourism was supposed to be one of the answers but tourists are fickle and ill informed. Many don't realize how expensive africa is. although it has some of the poorest people in the world, it's not cheap. Most raw materials for construction are imported - which means they're heavily taxed - making construction costs high. The global competition for tourists is largely based on price and african tourist locations find it hard to compete. and anyway, not many people see africa as a vacation destination. Even if the tourists come it's not all good - artisans soon realize that tourists don't understand quality and the high standards that used to be their pride become irrelevant. They set their apprentices to churn out rubbish which the tourists buy anyway. This demise has been going on for some time. The ancient process used to make Mauritanian "Kiffa" beads was nearly lost. Glass is ground to a powder and bound together by spittle and formed into shapes with patterns painted on the outside in coloured glass paste. after baking the bright red beads are strung together to make striking necklaces. Not long ago the only remaining artisan who still had the skill was found shortly before they died. Fortunately they were able to pass it on and now these beautiful beads are still being made and are sought after by bead collectors all over the world. Other skills are not so lucky. The irony continues. if you take the asante kente cloth, the "lost wax" brass, the "kiffa" beads out of africa they speak for themselves. People admire and desire them. They value the traditional skills, the natural materials and most of all the fact that a real human being - not a machine - made them. The problem then is quite clear - those in the world with money and comfortable lives need to be able to buy african arts and crafts. They want to own them, they're happy to pay a western style price, happy to give the artisans trade and happy that they can do something to help people less well off than themselves. This is the essence of eShopafrica's mission - to find new global markets for traditional african artisans so that they can build up sustainable businesses and earn a decent living. We're based in accra, Ghana and started working on our idea in 1999 when the dot com bubble was still bright and full. Ghana is well wired for africa... all over accra there are cyber cafes with bright hand-painted signs: "Gods Own Internet Cafe - 10 cedis a minute direct connection". Inside you can glimpse the rows of hunched shoulders squeezed together each peering into their own corner of cyber space. Boys selling shells on the beach give you their hotmail address telling you to email them. Ghanaians easily spotted the opportunities of contact that the Internet can bring. Connectivity was never a problem. telephone lines are available if you're willing to negotiate. Service providers are unreliable but that's not unique to Ghana. We easily found affordable software that allowed for offline web development and delivered orders by ftp circumventing day-to-day email and connection problems. Our Product Sourcer, Trish Graham an african craft expert from Canada called on her contacts in the african artisan community to source products. Her knowledge made it easy for her to see true quality and she made supplier agreements with artisans agreeing quality criteria and timescales for their work. Through our contacts we sourced products from other countries too. we have shawls from Ethiopia, baskets from Zimbabwe, mud cloth from Mali, Indigo strip fabric from Burkina Faso and more. a digital camera and spotlight made producing product images quick and easy and we started to build the site. But there's more to an ecommerce website than technology. There are legal and bureaucratic issues too and Kawther El Obeid, a Sudanese living in Ghana took care of that. Through her contacts in the business community she registered eShopafrica as an export company and opened local and international bank accounts. Many had warned us of the nightmare of export bureaucracy but the Ghana Export Promotion Council had other news. as we working in the non-traditional sector all export duties were waived - we were only asked only to keep a record of what we sold so that we could be included in their annual "best exporter" competition. | |
| Results | |
| By Feb 2001 we had tested the site and were ready to announce our presence to the world. We invited everyone we could think of to a launch party in accra - the ICT sector, diplomats, ministers, journalists, friends, relatives. We served traditional african drinks and snacks and had the site running with samples of the products for people to see. Everyone loved the idea. We got a couple of press mentions and emails of support from the local community - everything looked like it was going well.
Then.. Nothing. For a long time. We submitted the site to search engines, registered it with trade portals, subscribed it to lists, spent hours surfing and sending emails. We resorted to old fashioned letters in envelopes sending a kente woven bookmark as a sample. Still nothing - or almost nothing. We started to get a trickle of small orders - mostly through friends or the search engines - but not enough to help us grow or even keep going. But everyone was saying that ecommerce was going to be the saviour of africa. information technology was going to allow african traders to talk directly to global markets leapfrogging the repressive, profiteering middle-men who had been exploiting them. It sounded good but that was what we were trying to do in the art and craft sector and the world wasn't beating a path to our website. No matter how you look at it, an ecommerce website without orders isn't much use. Interest in africa comes in flurries.... Treasurer O'Neal and Sting came together in May 2002 - an unusual combination and world interest was running high. Was O'Neal going to make one of his famous gaffs? Would Sting say or do something outrageous? Michael Phillips of the Wall Street Journal was part of the press entourage and he and his photographer took time off to go down to the Teshie seafront to photograph the world famous Ga coffins. The Ga were originally a fishing community who lived on the land which was chosen for accra, the post independence capital of Ghana. The Ga have a tradition whereby you're buried in a coffin that reflects how you earned your living. Because they're a fishing community there's a strong fish theme with the most common coffins being shaped like red snappers, barracudas, lobsters, boats. But all professions are catered for - a 6ft long pepper for a pepper trader, a cocoa pod, a pineapple, a paw paw. a rocket launcher for an army general, a book for a preacher, shops for shopkeepers, chickens and turkeys for poultry farmers, trucks for a lorry drivers. In earlier times a chief was buried in a lion, a symbol of status and power. Nowadays chiefs are buried in a White Mercedes Benz complete with their real-world Mercedes license plate. When beads were the symbol of power and status in africa they were buried with their owners and in this way the Mercedes Benz license plates are continuing an old african tradition. The detail on these works is incredible. The shapes are perfect and the carpenters add texture giving the skin of the pineapple little spikes, roughing the lobster shell to make it look course. The sign painters who draw the brightly coloured shop signs that West africa is so famous for paint whatever is needed to make the illusion complete. These coffins are so visually witty reproducing as they do mundane objects on a large scale. Each one opens somehow with the lid often concealed as part of the design to reveal room for the deceased. Their visual splendour illustrates the african attitude towards funerals - a joyous celebration of the successful completion of this stage of life. They've been featured in National Geographic, there's a book written about them and several museums and galleries around the world own collections. Truly antiques of the future. The carpenters are not limited to coffins though. They're happy to make their products for people who want to keep them not bury them. We had a supplier agreement with an apprentice coffin carpenter, Samuel, for "decorated chests". Michael Phillips heard that eShopafrica sold coffins on their website - perhaps an Internet first? - and it caught his interest. a few days later we were mentioned on the front page of the business section of the Wall Street Journal with a picture of beautiful red snapper coffin. To a struggling website a media mention is a breath of life. We received an avalanche of emails some of them expressing support and some of them orders. It gave us a chance to test our supply lines. Some artisans let us down. Many more kept their word. It was great. great to have some orders, great practice and great at last to feel we could actually sell the things. Our artisans were happy too. they'd shown great patience as we bombarded them with questions about their exact processes, their materials and how many they could reliably make. Finally we were able to prove ourselves by passing orders on to them. We even got some orders for Samuel - a chicken and a peacock for the US. Samuel had never seen a peacock. The only place in accra where we could find any were in the Indian Embassy but they wouldn't oblige with their tails so Samuel used photographs. But newspaper mentions are fleeting and soon the orders and interest tailed off again. The search engine orders increased but not much and it was clear that we still had a steep climb. Michael Phillips mentioned us again in an article about the copyright problems of african print designs producing some interest in our fabrics but again it tailed off. In February 2003 an email arrived from Briony Hale, the BBC online business reporter. She had found eShopafrica through the search engines and wanted to know our story. a few weeks later Samuel and his peacock under construction were in the business section of the BBC website with an article about eShopafrica and what we were trying to do. If the Wall Street Journal mention was a breath of life, this was wind in our sails. Emails of support and - more importantly - orders started to come in. and this time there were more of the business to business and bulk orders that we wanted. Websites last longer than newspapers because we continue to get emails saying "We just saw the piece on the BBC website." We thanked Briony Hale for waving her magic wand - she was surprised to find she had such power. It seems that the Internet is such a wild and dangerous place that a mention by a known brand gives people the perception that you're safe. But as Briony pointed out, she had no idea whether eShopafrica was serious or not - she'd just found us through the search engines and thought she could make a good story. | |
| Lessons | |
| Perhaps the single most important thing about an ecommerce website is how to get your customers' money. In Ghana we were easily able to set up a dollar bank account which could receive international bank transfers but bank transfers are dinosaurs and a disincentive to people who've got used to clicky credit card payments. In 1999 WorldPay didn't much care that we were in Ghana - such was the spirit of the day that it was enough that we were "on the internet". We were given a merchant account that gave us the ability to take online payments. But suddenly the world changed. in the post 9/11 era WorldPay cancelled our merchant account. New UK legislation meant that they had to enforce their "Know Your Customer" scheme. They had to be able to physically visit your place of business and Ghana was too far away.
It was a devastating blow and we frantically began to look around for an alternative. all the credit card service providers spoke with one voice - businesses based in sub-Saharan africa need not apply. It could have been the end of us - without credit card processing we would lose the steady flow of smaller orders that were an important part of our business. In a rare case of true philanthropy SustainableVillage.com a US website dedicated to promoting sustainable development issues offered to process credit card payments on our behalf. It's a cumbersome process and takes them and us time and trouble but at least we can continue to take credit card orders. Having the ability to process credit cards is a Trojan horse because it attracts the fraudsters. Some fraudulent orders are just people trying their luck - they're easy to spot and just waste time. But the dangerous ones have credit card numbers and can look like serious orders. But the real owner of a credit card has up to six months to challenge a charge they find on their statement and you just can't wait that long before you ship. We've fallen victim to this type of fraud and in response have developed our own system of verification. We always enter into discussions with our customers - which isn't difficult because are a lot of things to talk about like delivery times and shipping costs. By entering into discussions we eliminate most fraudsters who, it seems, don't like to chat. If we're highly suspicious (some hotmail and yahoo emails are just too ridiculous) we request some mundane credit card detail like the postcode before we even begin to process the credit card. Genuine customers are happy to comply but we never hear from fraudsters again. This contact works in our favour in other ways. Our customers tell us how much they enjoy the close contact with people physically located in africa and dealing with real african artisans. They send personal messages of thanks when their orders arrive which we pass on giving both sides the feeling of contact that's so important. Because of our contact we can include customers in our problems. at a certain time of year it's hard to get baskets from Northern Ghana because everyone is busy planting and harvesting. agriculture is the their main source of income - baskets are only supplementary - so if we have a basket order during the growing season we explain the reason for the delay. Customers are more than happy to wait and their increased awareness of the basket makers' lives becomes important to them. We knew that the high cost of shipping from africa would be a problem and it is. To complicate things charges can be calculated by weight or volume and it's difficult to predict the crossover from one to the other. Putting shipping costs next to the product on the site can be tricky because there are so many variables and it could be misleading. We usually rely on sending shipping quotes after the order has been placed to make sure it's accurate. It can happen that the shipping is more than the cost of the products which customers query. We tell them we have no control over shipping costs which is why we keep the two completely separate. Even so, it can still be a good deal. For example we have seen a poor quality Djembe drum for sale in a New York music shop for $500 and yet the cost of our genuine Djembe including shipping to the US is way below that. Looked at this way many customers continue with their orders. When we started the Internet was seen as a wonderful, positive place which thrived on goodwill. as the bubble burst the philanthropy evaporated and everyone desperately tried to figure out ways of making money. When we started we had believed, as many others, that marketing budgets were a thing of the past because being "on the internet" was enough. This was a mistake. the things that are free are too crowded and anything effective costs. We never allocated a budget for marketing and were lucky that media mentions did their job or we would not have survived. | |
| Development Impacts | |
| Since the BBC mention the word about eShopafrica has spread far and wide. We're often contacted by NGOs and development organizations who are working with low level artisan communities in other african countries who would like to sell their products on our site. Internet savvy african artisans and traders contact us too. they'd all like to see their own products for sale on the Internet. The beauty of a web site is that space is not a problem and the more artisans and products we have, the better for us. We make no charge for products to be put on our website - we ask for samples of work which we either return or pay for. all our artisans understand that their products must meet our quality guidelines or they will be refused. What's important now is to build up the markets to prove to these artisans that it's worth their while to make high quality products.
We're now getting the kinds of orders that we wanted from the beginning. Bolgatanga baskets made by Maata N Tudu, an association of poor rural women in Northern Ghana, are very popular with Californian health food stores. We send an information sheet about the women's daily lives which the shops display next to the baskets - again people like the feeling of contact with the ordinary people of africa. We've been supplying a steady stream of musicians and bands with Ghanaian drums and percussion instruments and a school in Turkey is in the process of ordering a complete african orchestra. Oklah Tetteh our Krobo glass bead maker is very popular and his beads made from recycled glass are now for sale in bead shops in the UK, Sweden, australia and the US. The shop keepers tell us that his beads are sold as soon as they are put out. a designer in the US is making kente cloth pillows and cushions which are popular with african americans. Collectors contact us looking for special things like tin toy models or low-level village handicrafts - things that you could normally only get if you travelled to africa yourself. The artisans are very grateful both for the orders and for what we're trying to do. They frequently ask if they can include a gift for their customer - an important african custom. as long as it doesn't alter the cost of shipping we send it along. Our customers are very happy - it's not often these days that you get more than you ordered. and Samuel. Samuel is now famous in Teshie for having his picture on the BBC website. He has paid off his apprenticeship and is setting up his own business. Briony Hale ordered a small red pepper which was the envy of her BBC colleagues. Samuel had a large order for an exhibition in Moscow with the two star pieces being a full-sized (6ft) Ferrari and a Nokia mobile phone - firsts for the coffin carpenters of Teshie. Under production he has a Suburu Impreza for BBC Top Gear Magazine - another first. Customers often ask if alterations can be made to the products such as making the beads all to a uniform standard so that they can be included in catalogues. If the request is reasonable the artisans are happy to oblige and are grateful for the knowledge of what is needed to make their products more saleable. They're more than willing to innovate too. Samuel is now producing chests in all sizes from "desk top" through to the traditional size. Even if you haven't room for a six foot chest in your house you can now own your own "mini-coffin" in desk top or table top size. Samuel has made a life-sized football and giant computer mouse which are just as much fun as the large pieces and much easier to ship. Oklah the recycled glass beadmaker is working on making coloured glass chips for Italian mosaics and there are more ideas to come. eShopafrica is organizing a design competition in Rome for art and design students to design products suitable for western markets that use african arts and crafts. Students will be shown samples of crafts from all over africa to increase their awareness of what african artisans can make. Who knows, one day our dream of seeing something african amongst the top designer labels of Europe may yet come true? Every single order represents the completion of our mission - to get global orders for african artisans. But we still need more so that we can build up a customer list providing regular, repeat orders that can form the foundation of sustainable businesses. although we still have a climb ahead of us it seems less steep than where we've been. and after all, many ecommerce sites that started trading on the Internet when we did no longer eist - and we're still growing. | |
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