Week in Malawi: Part Two

Monday, March 14th

I wake up around 7am and on my way downstairs for breakfast I notice that Lilongwe has somewhat awakened as well. There are people and cars moving about on the street outside the hotel, a big change from Sunday’s laziness, but it still pales in comparison to Lusaka and Nairobi.



I’ve been paying about $50-60/night at the hotels and this price includes a breakfast. Kiboko Town Hotel is no different, so I start my day with a bowl of cereal, fruit salad, orange juice, toast, two eggs, and coffee. My boss is getting in from Nairobi around noon, so I have a few hours and decide to venture out into Old Town.

Just outside the hotel, there’s a paved lot on the right hand side of the intersection where a craft market has sprung up. There are roughly 100 or so “stalls” where merchants are selling wood carvings, paintings, and a bunch of other souvenirs that I’ve noticed in all the African cities I’ve visited. I guess if you’re just visiting Malawi or just visiting Zambia you might buy a wood carving thinking its design is unique to that country. It’s not. I walk by the market and am approached by no less than three guys all greeting me with “Hello, friend, how are you? Where are you from?” I amuse them at first, but by the time the third guy comes to me and says “Hello, friend,” I’m annoyed enough to have a strong desire to reply, “First of all, I’m not your friend. ‘Hello, stranger,’ would be more accurate and second, I’m not interested in anything you’re selling.” They are all selling the same things and seem to use the same strategy. They show me some carvings. I’m not interested. They show me some paintings. I’m not interested. Okay, maybe something small, just a small souvenir for someone back home. I carve these key chains. You can tell me the name of the person, I’ll make a special one for him or her. No thank you. It makes me angry that they're all selling the same things. I want to ask each one how they differentiate from their competition. What’s your marketing strategy?

I make it across the street and away from the market. There are two large shopping plazas that look like they’d be at home in suburban US. I wander around each. There are several currency exchange bureaus, a few travel agents, a grocery store, two office supply stores, and a few clothing shops. I go into Game, a South African chain store that is similar to Wal-Mart, although much smaller. I walk the aisles and find the store to be well laid out with pretty good products. It wouldn’t be out of place in the US which is weird because it’s directly across the street from an informal market where hawkers sell goods from the muddy ground.

I get back to the hotel just in time to meet my boss who will be here for a week to introduce me to the distributors and NGOs we work with in Malawi. We have lunch at the hotel and then walk across the street to one of our distributors.

In Zambia the private distributors we sell to were much bigger companies than I expected. Two of them have agriculture/farming/hardware stores throughout the country and a large sales force that works in the more remote areas. In one case, the sales force alone totals 900 people. The other distributor has just one shop in Lusaka, but this shop has a huge showroom and warehouse. They sell mostly to large scale commercial farms and have everything you might expect: huge tractors, irrigation systems, and farming machines that are impressive in size even if I have no idea what they do. The biggest distributor we work with generates $10million/year in revenue, a far cry from the mom and pop shops I was envisioning (though even the largest distributor’s stores in the towns feel like mom and pop operations). The distributor we meet with in Lilongwe is much closer to what I had anticipated.

You wouldn’t even notice it was a store if you hadn’t already known. The name of the shop is painted above the door but it could use a touch up. Most of the letters are peeling away and the royal blue paint is deeply faded. When you enter the store, there’s a blue irrigation pump to your right, a hallway in the back right corner, and an office directly in front of the door. It’s a large rectangular room with nothing on the unpainted cement walls and a small wooden school desk in the middle of the room. It feels more like a classroom than a store. There aren’t any products displayed save for a large piece of cardboard that rests against the back wall, next to the desk, with little baggies of seed and fertilizer stapled to it in rows. The cardboard seed display looks like a 4th grade science fair project. We meet the two main guys that run the store and sit down in an office.

My project is to try to develop some sort of system for tracking the pumps we sell to distributors all the way to the farmers they are selling the pumps to, so I’m here in Malawi meeting with the distributors to find out what customer information they capture when they sell a pump. In Zambia, most of the distributors are big enough to use a fairly sophisticated computer system to track sales, inventory, and customers, making my job a little easier. I don’t have to ask too many questions of this distributor before figuring out that it’s going to be much more difficult here. All sales are tracked with paper receipt books, and from the look of this guy’s office, I don’t hold out much hope that all receipts and invoices are organized in any reasonable manner.



Even so, we get some good information and plan on coming back tomorrow morning so that they can pass along some additional data. My boss and I return to the hotel and have an hour to catch up with some emails before dinner. Kiboko Town Hotel has a nice second floor sitting area with a relaxing bar and a comfortable environment. I sip a Malawian beer called Kuche Kuche and while firing off a few emails, listen to the bartender’s soundtrack. KC and Jo-Jo, Eminem, and R.Kelly. Who can argue with that?