Magdalene Mankah

Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to Magdalene Mankah by GHAPE in Cameroon. We are excited to watch this business grow. Over the next 18 - 18 months, GHAPE will be collecting repayments from this entrepreneur and posting progress updates on the Kiva website.

Entrepreneur: Fru Magdalene Manka.

Location: Alabukam

Loan Amount: $300

She received the loan of $300 on April 16th; 2007.She bought one bag of koki beans and one tin of palm oil. She kept part of the money as reserves to buy more koki beans if she runs out of stock. She had had some challenges in transporting the cooked koki from her Alabukam resident to the market which is in Bamenda town. This had made her to always arrive the market late. She is soliciting for advice. She will start repaying the loan in July 2007.

Four years after joining GHAPE and taking her first loan, Magdalene Mankah is radiant and laughing when asked to describe the change she has seen in her life. Before anything else, she lifts up the edge of her skirt to show off the “cycles” (bicycle shorts) that she can now afford to wear to increase her comfort when working. (Over the course of a day of interviews I discovered that nearly all the women in Magdalene’s GHAPE center do the same.) More importantly, Magdalene has been able to build a house for her family, so they can move out of her father-in-law’s house. She also sponsors most of her children in school and pays medical fees for her husband, who is an invalid and does not work.

With the loan of 150,000 CFA ($300) taken last May, Magdalene added to her business and worked her farm. Her business, which she started with her first GHAPE loan, is preparing “koki beans” – a dish made from ground beans, wrapped in a banana leaf and boiled. The loan went to buy one month’s ingredients: one tin of palm oil for 10,000 CFA; half a bag of beans for 12,000 CFA; two days worth of plantains (3,000 CFA) and banana leaves (1000 CFA). She prepares koki beans every Saturday and Sunday – about 50 bundles per day, each sold for 100 CFA ($.25) – and her children go to sell them around town. Each day, she can profit about 2,000 – 2,500 CFA ($5-6).

Magdalene used some of the loan to work her farm, where she spends her weekdays. One part of her farm is devoted purely to cassava, a starchy tuber popular in Cameroon, which must be cultivated for nearly two years before it can be harvested. Magdalene paid 10,000 CFA for labor to clear part of this farm, and another 20,0000 to build rows and plant. Then, over the course of the year, she paid for it to be weeded three times: 10,000, 8,000, and 5,000 CFA. The cassava that Magdalene harvests throughout the year she makes into garri and water fufu – both labor-intensive processes involving grating, fermenting, and drying over several days. She takes these products to the Bamenda town market every Saturday, usually selling about 15,000 CFA of garri and 10,000 CFA of water fufu every week.

The rest of Magdalene’s farmland is used to cultivate corn, groundnuts, yams, sweet potatoes, Irish potatoes, and huckleberry (a popular green). Most of these crops go to feed her family, but Magdalene takes any surplus – usually yams, beans, and dried or fresh corn – with her to market on Saturdays.

Magdalene’s five children are all either in school or learning a trade. She receives help with some of the school fees by her sister and the Fon (the local chief) of Mankon, but Magdalene pays 70,000 CFA annually for her second child’s secondary school, and another 7,000 CFA for her youngest, who is in primary school Class 3. Her greatest expense is caring for her husband, who suffers from bad stomach pains that have kept him from working for the last eight years, Over the last few years, he has had four operations – costing between 80,000 and 150,000 CFA each – to attempt to treat the problem.

Even while managing all these expenses, Magdalene saved enough since joining GHAPE to build a house for her family, costing 400,000 CFA. After sending her thanks to those Kiva lenders who helped to finance her loan, which she has nearly finished paying, Magdalene extended a promise – to them and to herself. “Tell them that, if they continue to finance my loans, in six years I promise that I will have a car.” Magdalene says she is now learning to drive on a nearby field and adds, “By that time, I will have the courage to drive on the roads.” In Cameroon, this is saying a lot.