Expat Zimbabweans use the Internet to arrange care packages for the folks back home
With the economy collapsing and inflation running wild, there's no longer any point in sending cash to family and friends
STEPHANIE NOLEN
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
July 4, 2007 at 4:17 AM EDT
JOHANNESBURG — What do you get when you combine the cutting edge of e-commerce technology with hyperinflation, a collapsing economy, and a burgeoning humanitarian crisis? You get zimbuyer.com, a website that allows Zimbabweans in exile to make online purchases of food and other necessities for delivery to family back home, letting them know via text message that a sack of corn or cooking oil is waiting.
The website is the brainchild of a 26-year-old named Laz, who left the country in 1999 to study information technology in Texas. But by the time he was finished school, President Robert Mugabe had begun his slide into dictatorship and Zimbabwe's economy - once the healthiest in Africa - was imploding.
Laz knew there was no work back home; instead he stayed abroad and found a job at America Online. Then, last year, it occurred to him that he could put his e-commerce training to work for people back in Zimbabwe. (Like many others working in this field, Laz was afraid to have his surname published for fear of reprisal from the Zimbabwean government, which has criticized initiatives such as this that subvert what remains of the Zimbabwean economy.)
Zimbabwe, like many African countries, has long been dependent on remittances from citizens working abroad (which far exceeds the value of all foreign aid that is delivered to the continent). But these days inflation in Zimbabwe runs at 4,500 per cent, in the government estimate, or twice that, if you believe independent economists. That means that people insist on getting paid their wages daily, that an estimate from a business for work to be done is good for only 30 minutes, and that prices on restaurant menus change from the start of the lunch hour to the end.
It also means that there is little point in Zimbabweans working abroad sending cash: It must be delivered at the posted government exchange rate, rendering it almost worthless, and it loses what value it has in a matter of days.
"The only things that keep value are commodities - petrol, cooking oil, sugar - or foreign currency," said Joeseph, an expatriate Zimbabwean who works in the Alberta oil patch and who uses zimbuyer.com regularly to send parcels to relatives. "And if you don't send help, how are they going to survive?"
So, suddenly there is a thriving business in websites such as this which allow people to send commodities back home, and to help their families negotiate the increasing scarcities in Zimbabwe by electronically providing them with cellphone airtime or fuel vouchers.
On zimbuyer.com, Joeseph can place an order for pork chops, or school notebooks or a generator, and pay for it with a credit card or the Web-based service PayPal. Laz and his staff then e-mail the order through to Harare immediately, and their local team goes into action: Six staffers in Harare and four in Bulawayo physically fill the orders - they are outside the shops at 5 a.m., scouting out a rumoured shipment of cooking oil. When they can't find products to fill an order in Zimbabwe, they cross into South Africa or Botswana and import the products, facing the crippling import taxes and bribes that go with that - but Laz said they are insulated to some degree because their buyers have purchased in foreign exchange. Deliveries are made within 72 hours. (Business could get more complicated in the coming weeks, however, as Mr. Mugabe has deployed riot police to enforce government price controls, which he blames for inflation; as a consequence many shop owners say they simply will not restock.)
Zimbuyer.com has had more than 4,000 clients, and is adding them by the day. "You've got Zimbabweans who are economic migrants all over the world what they have in common is that everyone wants to support their families," said Laz, who now lives in Birmingham, England, and runs the site with his sister. He still has a day job in Web design, while she is a health-care assistant.
Never Ndemera founded zimland.com three years ago, and it focuses on selling food hampers. Mr. Ndemera owns a nursing-placement agency in Britain, at which the majority of his clients are nurses who have fled Zimbabwe's collapsed civil service. Zimland.com grew out of a desire to provide a perk to employees: He knew many were worried about the children they left back home, and wanted to provide a way of reassuring them that they were getting fed each day. Customers place an order on his website, he sends it through to a shop in Zimbabwe, which prepares the parcel - meanwhile, recipients receive a text message advising them of what's waiting and where they can collect it. Mr. Ndemera's agents in Zimbabwe settle their accounts with local shops each week.
The slickest entry into this field is the site mukuru.com, created by a Zimbabwean named Rob, now 29, who went to work in Britain three years ago. He, too, found work in the tech sector, but as he watched British designers get obsessed with videos and gaming on cellphones, it seemed to him they were missing the most obvious thing a cellphone could do.
"You can send 160 characters of information from the First World to Africa in seconds for almost nothing," he said.
So, 1½ years ago he created mukuru.com (the name means "respected" in Shona, one of Zimbabwe's main languages) on this business model: They buy bulk cellphone air time, satellite TV time, or petrol coupons, resell them at a margin in small quantities on the website, then notify people in Zimbabwe than they have been "sent" air time or 50 litres of petrol. "We send a [text message] that says to the recipient, 'Hi, your aunt in London just sent you 40 litres of petrol,' " he said.
This business has been so successful that mukuru.com has expanded into South Africa and will begin imminently to serve Kenya and other African countries, which don't have Zimbabwe's particular desperate need for commodities, but have many expatriate citizens who routinely help out family back home.
The site has had 8,000 customers so far and is adding 50 a day these days as word of its reliability spreads, said Rob - who now has a team of eight and has long since left his cellphone-ring-tone job.
Like Rob, Laz finds himself with a successful e-commerce business in zimbuyer.com, but he would love to pack it all in. "Any Zimbabwean that you ask will tell you, 'I'd rather be back in Zim,' " he said. "It's just the current state of things that's keeping people away - it would make no sense to go back now, I'd have no way of supporting my family."
And how many people is he supporting? The question made him laugh. "I don't even really know. When you add in the cousins, the grandchildren, a lot. Just a lot."
*****
Crippled by inflation
Inflation in Zimbabwe has reached the point where the price of basic goods is now more than 45 times what it was a year ago. The graph shows the percentage increase in the Zimbabwe Consumer Price Index over the previous 12 months. Most independent economists say the real rate of inflation is double the official rate.
January, 2000: 55.9%
May, 2000: 4.530%
SOURCE: RESERVE BANK OF ZIMBABWE, NMBZ HOLDINGS LTD.
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