Wokai Adventures

If you want to become big, should you think big or think small?

Casey

Over the last month we've been reworking our vision to think bigger, trying to tweak our model to hopefully have a much larger impact in the long term. The whole process has gotten me thinking a lot about whether, if we want to become big some day, we should think big or think small. I guess there are two paths: the first being organic growth, where you focus on the present, do your best at each moment, focus on recruiting contributors one at a time, and see what happens, the second is going in with the huge vision, "we're going to change the world" perspective and building from there.

I hear a lot of perspectives on this argument. There's the voice of the VC type people that say, "keep making your idea bigger, get huge names to back the organization and push it forward." On the opposite end of the spectrum, Tom Williams, my friend who founded another online giving site called Give Meaning says, "you have to be grassroots if you want to be successful [as an online giving marketplace] fundraising for other grassroots programs". According to Tom, the traditional business like approach to developing on online giving marketplace just doesn't work. I think that Jake de Grazia one of our favorite dawning entrepreneurs who's starting the Carrot Project would agree. Both Jake and Tom believe that focusing on each individual user, community building, and what you might call "customer service" in the traditional business sense, is key. You have to create torchbearers and be grassroots...then eventually you'll have a community of others that assimilate into the organization and grow it with you.

I wonder whether Jake and Tom are right and the down-to-earth approach is a key to web 2.0 success. If they are right and it's all about the grassroots approach, it seems like the leaders of that model of organization couldn't be caught up in the big vision and executive planning that will take them there. If you're model is all about building an organic organization that's driven by the community, then you can't really plan out the one year, three year, and ten year plan for the organization. It will grow organically, along with the community that takes it on as it's own. If it's going to become big, that community will take it there in it's own time.

While I love that idea, the VC approach has it's merit as well. If you get the highest qualified backers in the world behind you, are well funded, and have solid governance boards and executable plans, why wouldn't you succeed? This model has worked for thousands of tech and non-tech firms before.

There is one peice that I could see as a possible weakness in this model in the case of an online giving marketplace in that there's a fundamental difference between an online giving marketplace and a traditional e-commerce site like amazon.com. I often wake up thinking that I need to go online and buy a new book that one of my friend's recommended to me. I have never woken up thinking, "today, I want to go online and find a cause to donate to." People, rather than money, is what makes me give. Say when my hair stylist, Elaine, told me that she had discovered this awesome new thing called "Kiva". She gave to a woman in Kenya who was opening a tailoring shop. She told me all about her borrower, how much she loved kiva, and all of the other people who'd given in her bookclub. Although I already knew about Kiva and how great it is, her story made me want to go home, log on, and give.

Using Elaine's story as an example, for an online giving marketplace to be successful, it seems crucial to have marketing done on a viral basis from torchbearers within your community that were touched deeply and want to share with others rather than traditional ad campaigns that present a product to potential consumers. What I don't know is whether there's a way to combine the two approaches or whether to be successful.I also don't know whether on a day to day basis, an entrepreneur should focus on becoming BIG or just doing the best possible on the day to day. Any ideas?

Internship Opportunities! Web Optimization and Media Analyst

Naomi Cookson

Naomi is Wokai's Chief Operating Officer.

Our website, launched in November 2008, is the center of Wokai’s work.  In order to drive traffic to the site we are recruiting two interns to work with our Marketing Director in Wokai’s Beijing office during the spring of 2009.  Each intern will work closely with the Marketing Director and take on different areas of Wokai’s marketing plan.  We seek a Web Optimization Intern to focus on the Wokai Pilot Program (beta testing of our website), Search Engine Optimization, and optimizing the content of our website to increase our “sharability.”  We also seek a Media Analyst Intern to focus on actively listening to what media reports about Wokai.org, help identify the best publications to target for Wokai marketing, create new press releases and content for the website.  Interns will also be asked to help with office tasks, writing, and editing.

Web Optimization Intern

—    Work with Marketing Director to continue managing feedback data from website users; turn this data into concrete changes that website developers can implement.  
—    Work on streamlining and creating content for the front end of Wokai.org. 
—    Work on Search Engine Optimization and growing Wokai’s web presence
—    Optimize Wokai’s website content and increase Wokai’s “sharability” online.
—    Help staff with writing and editing

Media Analyst Intern

—    Work with Marketing Director to research and develop a list of publications Wokai should target for publicity
—    Work on understanding what media (blogs, newspapers, magazines, etc.) report and write about Wokai and develop ways that Wokai can direct or optimize such media coverage.
—    Create new press releases under the guidance of the Marketing Director.
—    Create new content for Wokai.org and work on editing existing front-end content.
—    Maintain database of newsletter sign-ups and contacts
—    Help staff with writing and editing

Requirements 

Wokai requires a minimum four-month time commitment and a contribution of fifteen hours a week.  Media Analyst Interns must have excellent communication skills in English and ideally have a proficiency in Chinese.  Web experience will be especially relevant.  They must be passionate about microfinance and development in China.  Interns must also be self-starters who take initiative and like to get involved in new projects.  Wokai welcomes applications from interested candidates of all backgrounds and age—our internship positions are not limited to undergraduate students.

Compensation

Internship positions are unpaid.  However, our interns have the opportunity to work on building a start-up non-profit from the ground up.  Interns make a direct contribution to increasing Wokai’s presence and Wokai.org’s traffic, thereby ensuring that microentrepreneurs in rural China can access the funds they need.

To Apply

Send resume and cover letter to:

Naomi Cookson: [email protected]

Please indicate your start dates.  Interns will ideally start on January 12th, 2009.  Please answer the below question in your cover letter:

What is the first idea for Wokai you would bring to your new role?

Applications will be considered until December 22th, 2008

*Please indicate your proficiency in Mandarin, if any.

Stories from Inner Mongolia: The reason why I give to Wokai.

By George Scott

As a day of filming goes it couldn't have gone much worse. After charging the battery and checking the tape was rewound, I left the video camera on over night so in the morning the battery was flat again. Having been here for two weeks already, I was hoping having a camera would inject a little variety into the routine in which I’d found myself. Being fairly limited in what I was allowed and able to do I’d began to feel slightly despondent toward the trip and was hoping filming would somehow add another dimension. So once I’d realized the camera wasn’t on for the day, I nearly called the visit off, thinking that having had two weeks of trips all revolving around a similar theme, I wouldn’t be missing out on much.

As we drove further out of town, my mood began to lift, leaving the flat grayness of Daban behind us and passing onto the expanse of the grasslands. The grasslands really are very beautiful, over the weekend I climbed a little mountain to get a slightly better view, they’re also very large. We drove up passed an old dried up river bed and came to a small village nestled against the side of a mountain. It felt more remote and peaceful then some of the other villages I’d visited, and looked almost picturesque gazing out over still snow dusted plains that stretched out towards the distant mountains. Honestly no amount of pseudo-romantic language can do justice to the setting, it was beautiful. The village itself was made up of no more then eight or so small houses, evenly spaced between the river bed and the mountain. Walking into the house where our meeting was being held we could have been walking back in time. The house was very basic, we passed through an old Chinese kitchen, and into the only other room of the house, a larger meeting room, a kang, a raised heated stone sleeping platform, taking up a third of the room, sheets and blankets neatly folded to one side to make room for visitors to sit. During winter hot coals are put in a small stove under the platform keeping it warm as the temperature elsewhere can drop below -20. Four small stools and a fold away table, the only other furniture in the room.

In the main room everyone still wore their coats and gloves, but that isn’t anything particularly unusual for these rural parts. As soon as we arrived the table was brought out and a pot of hot tea was placed in the middle. As the rests of the group began to come in, jokes were exchanged with friends and family, there were three young children playing, dashing in and out not sure what to make of me, shouts of “Ni hao”, coupled with shrikes of excitement following them each time they ran away. Being too young to have started learning Mandarin, I’m a little worried that they’ll grow up with the misconception that all foreigners only speak bad Chinese and nothing else. 

A smiling elder lady sat down beside me, she didn’t speak very much Chinese, only Mongolian so Tu Ye, the loan office and my guide, acted as my interpreter too. They were all farmers, growing crops in the summer and looking after their animals in the winter. They’d all been customers of microcredit since 2002, each using the loan to buy tools and supplies for farming. When I asked them about their life before they’d starting borrowing, they said the difference between then and now was very big. They’d been times before when they’d struggled to find enough food, now they had plenty and each family could even afford a motorbike. The old smiling old lady who’s home we were in told me that before they started taking out loans their annual income for the household was around RMB 3000 roughly $200. Now, if the harvest was good they could earn over RMB 10,000 in a year. She said that simply they were happier. Seeing the children running around I ased about school, these three children hadn’t started yet. But all of the children in the village go to school. Up until last year when the government introduced new legislation, middle school and above came at a cost of RMB 3000 per year, equal to this one family’s entire yearly income. She said that didn’t matter, if the family couldn’t afford it they would borrow from friends and family.

I’m actually struggling to do get down exactly how kind and welcoming these people were. Here they were with almost nothing, living in what many people would describe as a shack and yet they were so happy, so warm and so generous. This is the reason why I’ll give back to Wokai. Even when they had nothing, earning RMB 3000 a year, they would still send their children to school even though it could mean, as it did up until last year, taking on the equivalent of a years income in debt just to pay for it. When I asked the smiling old lady about this she said, “We Mongolian people will do everything to ensure that our children have an education and a future.”

Microcredit had genuinely helped these people, and I really felt honored to have met them. Before we left, we were asked if there was any way we could stay and eat with them, almost to the point of insistence. I would have accepted, but Tu Ye had made it very clear the week before that it wouldn’t be fair to do so and I’m sure that I’ve done nothing to merit the banquette that they would probably prepare just because I of my presence.

So not having my camera was probably a blessing, giving me more time to speak to people I was here to see. Getting to know them instead of shoving a camcorder in their faces, which I’m sure wouldn’t have done anything for the conversation.

Stories from Inner Mongolia: Can you be too rich for microcredit?

George Scott

 

Today I attended a meeting for an entire village’s microcredit customers. In total there were five groups, 30 people, from a village where one third of the women were long-term microfinance customers. The meeting was held in an office that had been established by the village elders a generation before and passed down. There’s often a very strong sense of community in the villages I’ve visited, almost like a clan or a tribe, which seems to create a strong binds between them. The meeting was the last meeting in this loan cycle, all of the women there were making the last repayment of their 4^th loan, and signing a contract to take out their 5^th consecutive loan.

 

The meeting itself was a good example of how effective microcredit can be effective. Although they were in effect rural borrowers who lived in a small village of about 120 people outside of town, they couldn’t have been more different from some of the other groups I have seen. These women were smart, confident, well-dressed and to all appearances, businesswomen, a thousand miles from some of the other rural groups I’ve visited. As I started to ask questions I also began to notice a difference in their attitude to me. When I asked them how they used their loans, the only response I could seem to get from anyone was “small trade”, trying to get them to expand on exactly what kind of “trade” they were undertaking was like a drawing blood from a small stone. Some gave noncommittal answers about clothing but most really did just do small trade, buying what was cheap and selling it on for a profit. It began to dawn on me that the line of questioning that I’d used with other groups might not be as appropriate here, even seeming silly and rather patronizing to those I was asking questions of. When I asked why they took out a loan, many of them just laughed at me. Of course, it’s obvious to them why they took out a loan, why wouldn’t they? It’s money, it’s easy and convenient money. When I asked the equally patronizing question of how does their life now compare with their life before their loans, many said simply “about the same”. I got the feeling they thought I was perhaps looking for a story of how poor had been and how lucky they were now that they have access to loans, and they certainly weren’t going to give it to me. There was no sob story here that was going to make people reach for their wallets in sympathy, but was there perhaps something more interesting?

 

To me microfinance was created for the purpose of lifting people out of poverty, a leg up to those who had no other way out, a foot on the ladder of development. Whilst this group weren’t diving around in bran new Audi A8’s, they didn’t seem to be suffering the effects of poverty either, in fact they all seemed to be prospering. When I asked why they didn’t take out a loan in a bank, I was told how impractical it was; having to open an account first, and find three people to act as guarantors. I was told that a microloan was far more convenient, and they are. The service is brought to you, you don’t have to tie up any capital by way of a deposit, every two weeks/month when your repayment is due, a loan officer will come round and collect it from you. These women weren’t struggling to survive; they seemed to me like enterprising women who were making good use of the existing system. But in a region where I’ve been told that there is a strong demand for microloans, are these women unnecessarily taking up precious loan capital?

 

CZWSDA do have an upper income limit for customers, above which they won’t offer loans, but this only applies to first time borrowers. Previous customers whose income has risen above this level can continue to borrow year after year. And why not, it provides CZWSDA with a steady clientele, steady income and steady salary to their loan officers, much of whose wage is made up by commission. It would add another element of uncertainty if they were continually having to look for new customers to replace those that no longer qualified for microloans because their income had grown too large. However, should the upper income limit apply across the board to existing customers as well as new?

 

It’s very easy to continue handing our loans to the same group of customers, and it’s equally easy for the customers to become accustomed to taking our loans.  I see this in itself as the potential for a problem; instead of encouraging the development of self-sustaining businesses, borrowers may grown used to taking a yearly loan over time could grow dependent on their loan and may even structure their business’ cash flow around this regular influx of cash. The other maybe more important issue is by recurrently taking out loans each year, are they diverting money away from people who need it more then they do? It’s very easy to continue to hand out easy money to old customers even friends who are more then happy to keep receiving it, but should there be a cut of point where the industry says that’s enough, it’s time for someone else to have a turn? Is there a way that Wokai can ensure that it is continually helping the poorest of the poor, and that money that is donated gets to those people who need it most?

 

I am perhaps unqualified to talk about this and before drawing any more conclusions I would have to research much further. I think this is an interesting issue. Whether or not it is an issue here in Chifeng depends on the ratio of loan capital to potential borrowers, but in a country where I’ve been told there’s a huge shortage of loan capital, if it’s not an issue here it must be somewhere else. If anyone has any thoughts or even corrections on the conclusions I have drawn here, I would love to hear them.

A Story Engine? A Diary? A News Source?

Leslie Forman

Leslie will soon join Wokai's core team in Beijing as Marketing Director. 

I've been looking closely at our initial Google Analytics website stats (Thank you Larry!) and the click-through reports from our Vertical Response newsletters, and I've seen an interesting trend: information about big companies (i.e Citigroup and Morrison & Foerster) and regulatory changes (rural development policy) attract the most attention.  This makes me think that our readers are a curious and career-oriented bunch, with a keen interest in learning how Wokai fits into the changing economic climate. 

Today I mentioned this to longtime Wokai supporter Jake De Grazia, and he suggested that we at Wokai have three categories of stories to share:

1. Our Borrowers' Stories: Jake says the most interesting part of our site are the real experiences of these entrepreneurs in rural China.  So far my favorite story on our site is from Lian Hua:

"We have a very cute 6 year old daughter who is very clever and loves to sing and dance. We used to live together in the countryside but in 2001 we moved to Da Ban, a small town, because the government asked everyone to move. There, we did mostly part time manual work to earn a living. In 2004 I thought a lot about starting my own milk tea house and eventually did. Although the range of customers is a little limited, the location is fantastic."

I love this story because I can totally picture her cute and clever 6 year old daughter singing and dancing, but I can't imagine the government asking my family to move to a different city.  This story fascinates me for both its relatability and distance from my own life.  At the Online Giving Markets conference at Stanford, Bennett Grassano from Kiva said that he sees their site as a "story engine," and I think that Wokai could fit this description as well.   

2. The Story of Wokai: Jake mentioned that his favorite part of this blog is Casey's earnest blog posts, ranging from warm and inspiring to radically transparent.  These posts document the story of social entrepreneurs building a new organization in a challenging Chinese landscape.  They update our followers on day-to-day progress, share the backstory behind Wokai, and connect us with other social entrepreneurs.  Maybe someday we'll hear stories like this one from the Social Actions blog, about how Matt from Kiva's blog inspired Tori Tuncan to start Lend4Health, an online space for peer-to-peer microfinance for autism treatment.

3. The Big Picture: New developments in China, microfinance, peer-to-peer lending, the world economy, etc. and how they relate to Wokai and our team members' personal interests.  My dad mentioned that many people are losing their jobs in the current financial mess (myself included... my last job anyways...) and may be looking to use their skills in more socially-conscious ways, so this information could be more relevant than ever... 

Note: Larry's comment below inspired me to add one more type of story, to the three that Jake mentioned, so here it is!  

4. Our Contributors' Stories: The incredible outpouring of support that we've seen from our chapters, advisors, donors, and so many more, has been so important to our development.  Each member's personal connection to microfinance in China has turned our website into a fascinating tapestry of experiences.  Here is one of my favorite contributor stories, from Lisa M: 

 

I am a mother of two girls adopted from Anhui and Jiangxi Province.... My daughters are both from rural China, from areas that are poverty-stricken and very underdeveloped. Poverty and lack of opportunity play a part in child abandonment in rural China. I am happy that an organization such as Wokai exists, allowing me to give back to a country that has given me so much.

By highlighting these stories on our site, our users can make Wokai.org their own! 

Eventually I'd like to see Wokai feature all four types of stories on our homepage, to satisfy all four types of readers.  What do you think about this?  What kinds of stories are most interesting to you?

To perfect wokai.org? Or, to wait?

Casey

Since we started beta testing almost two months ago an argument has been building within the Wokai team about whether to channel our energy into enhancing the frontend, public features of the site, and to begin developing new features, such as our user-generated China microfinance resource, OR to hold back and complete admin systems in our current site that the user never sees, but must be finished before version 1.0 of the site can be considered complete.

We've received amazing feedback from the initial community of contributors on ways that the site and user experience can be enhanced. In all of our heads, we also have this huge vision of what the site could become and all of the features that we need to add to take it there.

Leslie, Wokai's Marketing Director, and I are in one camp, advocating that we shouldn't start marketing Wokai on a mass scale until we've implemented our laundry list of ideas and have a site that we love.

On the other side of the argument is, Larry Sun, Wokai's Product and Technology Director, who says we should make sure that all of the features that are currently on the site work perfectly by the end of the year, then focus for the next three months on completing the backend admin systems.

 

         Me                   Leslie                            VS                                       Larry

 

                                   

                                

                   

Larry keeps telling us, "what we need to do now is just build a user base, analyze user traffic over the next few months, and then in the second or third quarter of 2009, start making frontend enhancements." On the other end of the argument, Leslie and I see the homepage and cringe, thinking "what a horrible use of space...it's not interactive enough...none of the best features of the site come through to the user that spends 2 seconds on our site then leaves because it's not worth their time...". We're sitting frantically mapping out the content and contributors that we want in the information resource part of the site.

Given the fact that Larry has over six years of experience at Google and Microsoft, he's winning now....

Wokai's current, homepage:

I'm sure this is the age-old dilemna that anyone who has built a website has run wrestled with.

Would any of you that have found a happy balance between working on future developments and stabalizing core features, please share what you've learned along the way?

Stories from Inner Mongolia: An introduction to rural life

George Scott

The three days last week I spent with Tu Ye, one of the loan officers at the CZWSDA branch in Youqi, were spent travelling between some local villages in order to attend centre meetings. Much like the urban centre meeting we attended on my first day Youqi, rural centre meetings are a chance to the loan officer to catch up with her customers as well as for the customers to make their repayments, then once the repayments have been made there is either a short training session, or group activity. On one occasion I had the honor of listening as one group sung a series of Mongolian folk songs. Lead by the head of the group they sang haunting melodies which, although it might sound a little contrived, seemed somehow to echo with the emptiness outside, the melody sounding so forlorn and encompassing that I was completely stunned into a silence. The rural borrowers are genuinely remarkable people, so warm and welcoming yet at the same time hard, like weather beaten stone.

 

Three ladies from the of Qiqiga, including Ruqumuge, our host there, in the middle

In the winter the temperature can easily drop below -25C, yet the villagers who live out on the plains will get up every morning religiously at 4am in order to start their days work, working solidly through until 9 or 10pm when they are finally able to go to bed. As I mentioned before, when I rather naively asked one village head what there was to do during the weekends, she laughed telling me that weekends were only for people who lived in the city. Whole villages are often dedicated to the one form of agriculture. Villages that raise crops during the winter, will all but shut down in the winter, concentrating only on keeping sheep or swine, the subzero temperatures making any sort of life or work out on the planes all but impossible. The village I came back from today, Masatala, makes nearly all of its living through dairy farming, each family keeping between 5 and 10 heads of cattle. Every morning the whole village will rise at 4am sharp to bring their cattle in for milking, the cows are then milked again in the mid-afternoon. Each milking session takes a couple of hours, which the villagers take in shifts. At 3.30pm precisely the entire group who’s meeting I was attending left to go and do precisely that. It is a relentless life seven days a week and 365 days a year, but it does have its benefits. The regular income that the dairy cows provide is far more reliable and stable then that provided by other forms of farming. When added to that the leverage that a microloan affords, enabling the borrower to add another calf to the herd or buy more animal feed for the winter, they are able to have a relatively comfortable life, selling more and being able to buy more of what they want or need in return

 

 

The leader of a borrowing group in Masatala outside her home. The corn behind her is used to supplement the feed for their cattle during the winter. 

 

Each village meeting I’ve visited has had its own distinctive character, some friendly and inquisitive, some more retiring and shy, whilst some groups have barely paid any attention to me at all, instead busy nattering and joking away barley acknowledging my presence, not that I would have wanted them act any differently. The inner Mongolian women who live here all speak Mongolian as their first language, a beautiful sounding language far softer and more melodic then it’s distant cousin Chinese, I’ve been told that it’s the ancestor and precursor of modern Japanese. They take pride in their Mongolian heritage, claiming to be straight talkers, not being afraid to say what they mean, and I know that they mean it. The village leaders are always strong confident women who clearly aren’t in the habit of taking any crap from anyone. Even in the more retiring villages the strength that these women have is easy to see, a strength that is earned only through a life of hard work and labor. Even after having spent only a very short time visiting these villages, I already feel great deal of respect for the people living here.

 

  

The Village of Masatala, named after the mountain you can see in the back of the photo

 

Most villages are each comprised of a dozen or so simple houses. Three of the four meetings I have attended have been held in the group leaders’ home, the other, in a village called Dushi, was held in a small village meeting hall. The homes were made up of three or four undecorated and sparsely furnished rooms. The main room is usually taken up by a large raised hard surface, under which hot coals are placed keeping it warm during the winter. Often this provides the only form of heating in the house, and in many rural homes acts as the bed where the whole family sleeps together. I often meet older borrowers who’ve children have chosen to leave the village in favor of a job in one of the nearby towns. This creates an added degree of pressure for their parents who remain behind to cope with the additional work. One lady I met, a lovely kind woman called Renqumuge, her children had both moved to Daban, a nearby town, to marry or for work. She grew crops in the summer and raised animals during the winter. Life was harder as it was just her husband and herself left to do the work, I think that they must both have been approaching their 60s. She told me that microcredit had given her just that little bit more freedom, where she is no longer living hand to mouth and can afford to plan and to sell what extra she can now produce. As I was leaving her village we were stood looking out toward the mountains across the snow covered grasslands in front of her house, I asked her if she would ever want give up this life and follow her daughters to the city. She replied saying nothing, only gently shaking her head and smiling out into the distance.  

 

Renqumuge’s village

 

 

Wokai's first major public mess up

Casey

Last Tuesday when I was in Inner Mongolia signing our first Field Partner contract, I received an concerned email from Dana Frasz, one of the organizers of the Ashoka Changemaker's Competition letting me know that if I did not reply by 6pm EST Wokai would be removed from the list of competition finalists. In doing fact-checking on the competitor's application submissions, Dana had found that Wokai's application had stated that we were finalists in the Echoing Green and Tech Museum Awards competition when in fact we hadn't. After reading her email, I started freaking out because we definitely did not win either of those competitions. We were semi-finalists in the Echoing Green competiton and only made it to the nomination round of the Tech Museum competition. I immediately checked out our submission, praying that our interns that wrote the application hadn't said that we won those competitions, but, unfortunately right in front of me was "Wokai has been awarded the Echoing Green fellowship for social entrepreneurship and the Tech Museum Award for technology benefiting humanity." What's worse was that in reading the application I realized that the volunteers who had drafted the application had made it a personal submission in MY NAME!!! What an absolute disaster! I'm cringing right now even thinking about it about it...aahhhh.

So, first of all, before I get to an explanation, I'd like to express a public apology to Ashoka, Echoing Green and the Tech Museum Awards for the mistatement in our applciation. There's nothing really to say other than that we completely messed up. That said, and I'm not trying to justify Wokai or my actions, it was absolutely unintentional.

At the time that we submitted the Changemakers application we were relying entirely on volunteers to find grant opportunities and write our grant proposals. One of our interns, who had been working on grant writing with us for six months, found the Ashoka Changemakers Competition, thought that we would be a perfect fit for the competition, and wrote our proposal along with another volunteer. On our online fundraising folder we have file copies of our submissions for Echoing Green and Tech Museum Awards and, having seen the files online, they must have assumed that we had won both competitions. On the last day of the competition, we were two days from launching our beta website and I was in the middle of an Online Giving Marketplaces conference in Palo Alto. I received an email from the volunteer submiting the application saying that we had a few hours before the competition closed and he needed my okay to send it in. Unfortunately, I hadn't realized that the competition submission deadline was that day and I didn't have time to read the application before heading to my next session. I gave him the go-ahead, without having read over Wokai's submission, obviously my fatal mistake, and the application was in. It wasn't until about six weeks later when I recieved the email from Dana at Ashoka, that I read our application, saw the misstatement, and realized that not only had we made the misstatement, but the application had been drafted in the first person under my name.

So that's the story of the mess that I created. There's not a lot that we can do now and I have to live with the consequences of the situation. It feels horrible to come accross as having intentionally lied on the application and not having any way of proving otherwise. It feels especially miserable given the fact that integrity is what we value most at Wokai, at the end of the day, 95% of us, myself included, are working for no money because we believe in improving the world and helping those less privileged than ourselves.

But, on the bright side, there are definitely some major lessons that we can learn from this situation and can help us improve the organization as a whole moving into the future:

1. Wokai needs rigorous controls and review systems to ensure that everything that we put our name on is accurate and error free:

Between marketing materials, the content on our website, borrower profiles, grant proposals, business plans, powerpoint presentations, research documents on China microfinance, and even our blog, we have thousands of pages of text coming from our office. All of those documents have to be 100% accurate, down to the last stat and reference, or there is no way that Wokai will be successful or considered legitamate. With a full-time western staff of three of us starting next month when Leslie comes on, there's no way that we can produce all of that content on our own. We definitely need to integrate volunteers and interns into our model to ensure that we minimize costs and work towards sustainability in order to produce the amount of work necessary to build Wokai's presense. BUT, we need to create robust review systems along the way to ensure the quality and accuracy of all Wokai work, whether drafted at one of our computers in our office in Beijing, or at the desk of an intern in Inner Mongolia, San Francisco, or Vancouver.

2. While volunteers are wonderful, outsourcing completely to volunteers is a bad idea.

3. Avoid submiting grant proposals in the first person unless you can actually draft the grant yourself.

Every day is an adventure at Wokai's office in Beijing...

Casey

I have many more substantive blogs to come in the next days about things like Wokai's website launch, developments in the organization, and new events in China microfinance, but I just wanted to briefly document an experience that we had yesterday in the office.

I was sitting at my desk yesterday afternoon, answering emails, and the lady who cleaning came out into our main office room holding a red bucket. Naomi and I both lift our heads in semi-annoyment, assuming that she's bringing out the bucket to tell us that, yet again, we lack some essential cleaning supply. She keeps on repeating "da-si". Both of us figure that "da-si" must be the newest disenfecting cleaning fluid...She begins repeating "danger" and finally gets our attention.

We look in the bucket, and there in front of us is a deadly scorpion! According to our Ayi, the scorpion had inhabited our bathroom for quite a while, which can be proven by the fact that there are no cobwebs to be seen, meaning that there are no spiders, all of which were eaten by our scorpoion. She goes on to explain that our scorpion was highly venomous. If someone were to be bitten by this type of scorpion, they would need an immediate expensive medical treatment, otherwise the bite would be fatal...

Apparently, “da-si" was not the newest cleaning product, but instead 打死, meaning "we have to kill this or it will attack one of us". Luckily, Chris Glen, our valient Beta Testing coordinator and intern from Idaho did the deed and we're scorpion free unless there are little babies running around.

Stories from Inner Mongolia: Ba Lin Stones, exactly what are our borrowers investing in?

George Scott

If like me you’ve had a look at our list of our now and previous borrowers you might be a little confused by what exactly are balin stones, or balindan as it’s been written in one translation. We have had a few borrowers who have pledged to use their loan to buy one or some of these Balin stones, some claiming that the market is right to make a profit of as much as 75% profit on a single stone in a year. With a couple days to myself and not wanting to stray too far from town as the temperature was fast dropping past -15(C), I went to investigate.

This sculpture was quoted to me at RMB 50,000 (about $8,500)

Balindan stones, named after the region they’re found Balinyouqi. They are a kind of semi precious gemrock. For those of you who are interested they’re “found along bedding planes and in fracture zones of altered ryolites and ignimbrites, i.e. welded tuffs, that have undergone dickitzation and kaolinitzation.” The Balin stone itself is a fine grained stone consisting of various colored minerals which is found exclusively in this area, with other similar types of stone found in other parts of the  China and India.The stones are soft, as rocks go, and can be carved into highly intricate and elaborate sculptures and name stamps

Not far from where I’m staying there is street dedicated to shops to selling these stones. There’s a small outside market and maybe as many as 50 small shops each full of ornate sculptures of dragons, tigers, Buddha and elaborate landscapes each carved from of Balin stone. According to the shop owner the price of the rock itself depends on the quality, which is dictated but the color, and the rocks texture. Balin stones are divided into many different kinds, the details of each I didn’t actually quite understand, but it seemed pretty interesting. The most expensive stones seem to be bright mono-color stones in oranges, yellows and greens and the cheaper over multi color grained stones. One shop owner told me that the market wasn’t very good at the moment, but when it was a couple of years ago, a good stone could double or triple in price in the space of a few years. (I’m still not sure whether this was all part of the sails pitch so perhaps its best to multiply all figures by 60%), he directed me to a couple of “good examples” both little bigger then a can of Coke, one he told me, which was carved into Buddah, would cost me around RMB20,000 the other orange and slightly larger RMB50,000. I’ve been quoted as much as RMB 150,000 for a similar sized stone, which was a color that was just that little bit less common. Good specimens of less common stones, I was told, both would always accumulate value well, and even in a poor market would likely increase by as much as 10% a year. More common stones would also keep their value, but when the market was down wouldn’t be such a good earner. 

When the shop owner realized that, RMB 50,000 was maybe a little out of my price range, he directed me to cheaper stones that could be used to carve into a name stamp. One example of a poorer quality stone of similar size would cost me around RMB 5000. Completely uncut stones seem also to come for any price, I was quoted anything from RMB 30 – 3000 for stones which to me were identical in size color and texture, but then who am I to know.

I understand the allure of the stones, they can lead to very good returns, if you have the right one and have enough time to let it accumulate value. As for whether it is a good use for a microcredit loan; many of the ventures that microloans are used to fund are long maturing investments, planting seeds for a harvest, or raising an animal. Repayments on a microloan are due after the first month, meaning in the mean time the borrower has to find other ways to generate money, the most common being trade of some sort. This perhaps isn’t an ideal situation but the staff at CZWSDA, our partner MFI, discuss their customers business plans and assess their situation before agree to loan them money and they will also instruct them on how they can generate income to make repayments whilst they wait for their investment to mature. In many ways investing in the stone market isn’t that different from waiting for a harvest or raising an animal, they all involve a long maturing investment which encompasses an element of risk.

Good Stones: RMB 50,000 – RMB 150,000 (the artists cut is also important of course)

Not such good stones: RMB 5000