Hiring People in Africa

I was here in Malawi for two main reasons. The first one was easy – I had to visit our three largest distributors and introduce a distributor incentive program that we created to help us gather data on customers. The second and larger reason was to kick off an assessment of how farmers are using our pumps in Malawi. Are they using them, how did they procure the pump, what price did they pay, did they get the pump for free, do they use the pump with a group of farmers, what crops do they grow, has their income increased because of the pump? We answer these questions very well in Kenya where we have a field staff that tracks and visits farmers on a scheduled basis, but since we distribute our pumps through the private supply chain and do not have any employees in Malawi, we’ve never actually quantified or measured the impacts of our pumps here. And that’s what we intend to do over the next month and what I was setting up the past two weeks. 

We interviewed 10 people on Tuesday and hired three data collectors who will travel around the country interviewing farmers that are using the pumps. The resumes we collected were comic gold. Skills such as "knowledge of the internet" and hobbies like "making friends" and "watching TV" were listed. The interviews were pretty fun too. Though we didn’t hire him, Kenasi, was the most entertaining. He looked like he was fifteen and wearing his dad’s suit, but he spoke like he was a 50 year old politician. I’d hire him in a second as a sales agent or spokesperson, and probably would have hired him for this project if he didn’t have to go back to South Africa for school before our project is scheduled to be done. It was also fun having my co-worker in the interviews. His questions included “you seem a bit dull...have you had breakfast?” and “you’re always like saying ‘Iike’ a lot, is that like some sort of like bad like habit?” I was actually impressed with most of the candidates and it was hard turning down  a few of them. We ended up deciding on Andrew, Gifton (a bit dull), and Michael Mike (like). And yes, that is his real name. We confirmed that in the interview. It reminded me of my Nicaraguan friend, Victor Victor. When he arrived for training he was wearing a shirt with a picture of a horse on the front and said "hung like a..." We just finished everything up and they will release to the wild on Monday, travelling to the far corners of the country looking for pumps, working with NGOs, and collecting data on an Android smart phone. Wish them luck.