A meditation on markets

As in every developing country I've traveled in, most everyday commerce in West African countries takes place on the streets rather than in "real" stores. There are some fairly big differences between and within countries, of course: In Accra especially, the markets come to you in that anytime you are stopped in traffic (which is about 80% of the time you're in a car), you are approached by vendors darting through the stopped vehicles to sell you anything from a bag of cashews to a colander to a cell phone -- you could literally do a day's worth of shopping without ever leaving your car. In Dakar people are particularly insistent that surely any white person wants to buy whatever it is they are selling. In Serekunda's main market I for some reason have been unable to locate the sellers of bananas and oranges, though other fruits and vegetables are readily available and you can get bananas and oranges on any road outside town.

But the basic point is that the "informal" economy far outpaces the "formal" economy in the realm of everyday goods and services.

I've been thinking a lot about why that is, how it works, and what the factors are that would lead to an informal market economy to turn into a formal store-based economy. Here's what I've come up with so far:

Hallmarks of an informal market-based economy

• Lots of small-scale subsistence or barely-above-subsistence farming/gardening
• Child labor is available for hawking goods
• Transportation has a relatively high cost in terms of either time or money, so lots of small outlets spread out all over town selling an item significantly reduces transaction costs
• High unemployment
• Low literacy/level of qualification to be employed in the formal economy
• Culture of markets
• Warm weather year-round
  

Hallmarks of a formal store-based economy

• Information about where to purchase things is readily available, whether because of chain reputation, the presence of the internet, or something else.
• Credit readily available/credit cards in widespread use
• Relatively high income level for lowest 20% -- high enough that the marginal amount you can earn by buying a good from a distributor and then selling it on the street, usually, against stiff, ubiquitous competition, is too low to be worth your time even if you are unemployed
  
• Strong culture/enforcement of paying sales/income taxes
• Strong enforcement of licensing/loitering/etc provisions
  
• Culture of stores (meaning simply that consumers are used to going to stores to buy things instead of buying them on the street)
  

I just made this list up, of course, and it really doesn't feel like it tells the whole story to me. I'd really love to hear other people's thoughts on this matter!

Additionally, other than food, almost all of the items being sold are manufactured outside of Africa. And in fact, a fair amount of the food is imported as well. I've tried to inquire as to how the goods are distributed to the vendors once they are imported, but the vendors almost universally fail to understand what the crazy white woman is trying to ask them -- and/or they don't have a clear picture themselves! It seems that the region's main exports to make up the trade balance are groundnuts (peanuts) and, in Ghana, cocoa.

The Gambia! (country #42)

Arrived in the Gambia last night to stay with Ibraheem Ceesay, Copenhagen AcFac-er extraordinaire, and his lovely wife Sirah. Have good internet access here -- more updates on the last 10 days to come tonight!

Also, I realized I left out Jamaica when I was country-counting, so this is #42! Full list:

EUROPE (18)
Germany
UK
France
Belgium
Luxembourg The Netherlands**
Denmark
Norway
Sweden
Finland
Lichtenstein*
Austria
Switzerland
Czech Republic
Slovakia
Hungary
Italy
Vatican*
Spain

NORTH AMERICA/CARRIBEAN (8)
USA
Canada
Mexico
Guatemala
Honduras
Nicaragua
Costa Rica
Jamaica

SOUTH AMERICA (6)
Argentina
Chile
Brazil
Uruguay
Paraguay
Bolivia

ASIA-PACIFIC (6)
Australia
New Zealand
Fiji
Singapore
Malaysia
China

AFRICA (4)
Ghana
Burkina Faso*
Senegal
The Gambia

*These are the 3 most questionable. Lichtenstein we went through on a train (we meaning my family, when I was 11) without knowing we had been in it until afterwards. The Vatican I think is debatable as to whether it's a country. And Burkina Faso, well, this was the extent of my visit there...

**Update: Oops, got this wrong the first time.

A rose by any other name...

I've arrived!

It's amazing to me how much my emotional state -- my aura, perhaps -- changes valence almost as soon as I land overseas in ways that I can't predict (though generally in a positive direction). It's partly based on actual events and observation, and partly simply on shedding the professional/busy/competent DC Taren and taking up the mantle of the curious/open/relaxed-but-alert backpacking Taren.

In this case, I stepped off the plane into 90-degree weather not dissimilar from a normal DC summer day, and was greeted almost immediately by an airport employee in uniform holding a sign with my name on it (spelled correctly!) Courtesy of my host family, who are well-connected, he escorted me briskly through security and the visa processing area and introduced me to my host's nephew Nasir. Outside we met with my host (I'll come back to his name) and his daughter Sarah, who is approximately my age and is a lawyer at a big Accra law firm.

My host, Abdulai Iddrisu, went to graduate school with my mother in Australia before I was born. She and my father helped him financially with his treatment after a bad car crash several years later. He has walked with a cane ever since, but raised his family of three daughters and continued a successful career in livestock consulting.

On his name: I asked Sarah what to call him and she repeated what he had told me in an email, which is that all of his children, nieces, nephews, etc, call him "Uncle Negro". I of course felt a little bit uncomfortable with using this phrase as a white American, but apparently I'm not the first to have reservations so after they laid out their usual points about why it was silly to feel uncomfortable using a name that isn't remotely offensive here, I decided to go with the flow. As Shakespeare might say, "What's in a name? A Negro by any other name..." OK, see, that still sounds really bad to me -- this is going to be hard :-)

Sarah and I drove back to the house and I put my bags upstairs in the room we'll be sharing for the next two weeks. Then over the course of the afternoon met many other members of the extended family, including Sarah's sister Faiza and her daughter Kalila, who you'll hear a lot about later.

Right now I'm struggling to stay awake (8pm Ghana time -- just need to stay awake for another hour and then get a good night's sleep, and jetlag begone!) but am so pleased to be here. Tomorrow, I'll be off exploring the city of Accra!

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow!

That's when I finally leave the US for the trip I've been talking your ear off about for months now (you know who "you" are). I started taking my malaria meds today, which made it all a little more real...

I started writing this sitting out on the porch of the stunningly beautiful Mohonk Mountain Retreat -- picture of the view included -- during a "free time" period of the 1Sky climate strategy retreat. I'm flying out tomorrow from LaGuardia to Accra, via Dulles (ironically), for a 6 week backpacking trip through West Africa.

I'll begin the trip in Ghana, staying for 10-14 days in Accra with family friends whose patriarch went to graduate school with my mother in Australia some thirty-odd years ago. Then I plan to head overland through Burkina Faso to Mali, where I want to go trekking as well as explore the capital city for a few days. That should bring me up to the beginning of December, when I'll head west to Senegal and the Gambia -- where I'll stay with the family of a fellow climate activist I met through the Copenhagen negotiations last year.

It's my first time to Africa -- and the longest continuous amount of time I'll have spent in the developing world since I was 8 when we lived in Argentina for 6 months. I'm a little anxious, a lot excited, and hopefully as open as I can possibly be to growing and learning and experiencing more of this complicated, beautiful, scary world!

Despite careful list-making and packing and ticking off all the boxes of things to take, I realized today that did forget something: My rain jacket/windbreaker. Forgetting something is inevitable in my experience, and I always feel better knowing what it is -- especially since in this case it seems like a fairly replaceable item that I wasn't even sure was necessary.

Oh, and thanks to everyone for a very enjoyable last few days in DC -- everyone who came to my birthday party on Saturday night, and of course my amazing housemates Ben, Paul, Michelle, and Seth, not to mention my might-as-well-be-housemates Libby and Babbott, for wonderful company on Sunday. See you all next year!

Thanks for reading my first blog post (f1rst!), and keep in touch (more soon on how to do that...) :-)