Final Exam Day

Final exam day for client business training classes was on Friday. What a day! Everyone had to take a ten question oral exam and pass with a 70% or more in order to be eligible for a loan. Clients were also finishing up their business plans from class on Thursday. Their business plans are written in their groups, so one plan per group, and they are then given to the Anlo Rural Bank for their loans.

We started our morning by printing off the final exam questions and going over them all with our teachers. We had to be sure that the questions would translate well into Ewe, and we also gave them 14 possible questions, of which they chose the best ten. After we had done this, I went to one of the morning classes in order to help them finish their business plans. There were only about two people in the class who understood any English at all, so I had one of the young boys in the village translate for me.

On a quick tangent. There are three boys here that have been absolutely wonderful to our team. They will spend entire days at a time translating for us, doing tedious and exhausting surveys over and over again with clients. They are all in school, but lucky for us they are on summer break right now. As a result we have three of the brightest kids in the village working for Lumana… I cannot even imagine what we would be doing without them.

Alright, so here I was standing in front of a class with Gadzito by my side, teaching savings plans. Somehow, perhaps by the grace of God, we were able to do the entire savings plan portion of the business plan with the whole class. This portion of the business plan has each group come up with a personal, business, and emergency savings goal. For example, their personal goal might be to save for their children’s school, or to build a new room on their house, their business goal might be to purchase a new hairdryer (in the case of the hairdressers), and their emergency savings goal is two weeks of personal expenses.

We start by taking the final amount they need to have saved, and then they tell me when they want to have it saved by (6 months, one year, two years?), and finally we calculate how much they will need to set aside each week in order to reach their goal.

This seems like a simple task. But then you think about it from a different perspective. You are trying to teach an entire class of people to make three different savings goals. Most of them have never participated in any sort of savings, much less divided their goals into different categories. Once you explain the concept of categories (through your translator of course), you must then communicate that they need to pick a particular item to save for, not just an arbitrary amount of money they would like to achieve for that ‘account.’

Once we accomplished this it was wonderful to see each group get excited about the prospect of having that thing which they decided to save for. By breaking it down into a weekly amount that they would need to set aside, the goal became much more tangible in their minds. There was a new energy of empowerment flowing through the room. They all realized how capable they are of actually reaching the goals that they set for themselves. What an experience!

After my lunch break I went back to the school to help the afternoon classes. Both of the afternoon classes had been able to finish their business plans the day before, but we still needed to administer the oral exam. Our four teachers were overwhelmed trying to process everyone, because our ten question exam was taking about 15 minutes per person.

I set myself up in a classroom, this time with Victor by my side to translate, and began giving oral exams. I gave exams for about two hours, all the way until we had processed every last student.

This was Lumana’s first time doing an oral exam, and there were good lessons learned in the process. Our team debriefed after the day and brainstormed ways to make the questions better understood once they are translated into Ewe. We also brainstormed how we can alter the questions so we are sure to be testing not terms, but application of the concepts. By applying all of our changes, the exam can be administered quicker in the future, and it will also be easier to translate, especially for the boys that are helping us. (One common issue I had was Victor telling me “by clarifying what this question is asking I am essentially giving them the answer.”) I ended up making up a few questions on the fly to remedy this problem. The process will be streamlined and uniform for our next round of clients.

This week we have our graduation ceremony for clients… and Patience, our loan officer, will be filling out loan applications with every group. We will then process all of the loan applications, decide on the final amounts, and make the money available for our clients in the bank. How exciting!