Southern New Hampshire University/University of Limpopo South African Microenterprise Development Institution

Leave it to the Republicans to oppose microloans and small enterprise budget assists to economically disadvantaged persons of continents that begin and end with the letter A and don’t feature tiny Asian geniuses with advanced degree paths for minors. Yes, I’m talking about Africa and the Americas, two places where apparently it’s manifest destiny to die of starvation whilst your banana republic rulers and psychotic genocidal despots make mincemeat of the general populace instead of building the infrastructure and strengthening education pillars.

No, Alabama doesn’t apply, though you might have thought so. But while Fannie Mae is no longer giving out subprimes to backwoods illiterates, the clearest indicator of the success of the microloan principle is the fact that millions are presently living under the watchful eye of the welfare state. It’s not a lonely existence, nor is it devoid of merit. Why, just the other day Buck Muskrat and his family of eight began the long, arduous journey into the hills of Arkansas with intent to produce and distribute “mountain sweet water” across state lines. Thanks to government micro-handouts, they get to install new filters on their custom-built still, ensuring that their customers will no longer suffer debilitating blindness, retching, and liver disease.

But let’s transport the process overseas to the squalid savannas and craven cocoa fields. What happens when you give Swahili Sue a generous grant of two thousand American? Sue, with the entrepreneurial spirit of her long-necked ancestors, is able to collect shiny pebbles, paying the kids of distant tribesmen sweatshop wages to gather shells (dead animals or bullet casings, either one), while her cousin, the one who owns the funky bodega (which he secretly runs a Nigerian email scam out of), sells her radiator wire from junked and burned out vehicles. She now employs neighbors, who previously hacked *their* neighbors to death with machetes for a living, to construct necklaces and bracelets, which she is then able to ship to the nearest city market, where corrupt officials, after being given their own economic stimulus packages, allow her to maintain a booth in the market next to the biggest tourist draw in the city. Pretty soon Swahili Sue is pulling in $500 every month. After bribes and payouts, she is still the leader of the pack, and with her growing capital she’s able to employ even more.

Pretty soon she’s running a small shop inside an air-conditioned building. She gets calls from local politicians, who want her opinion on new zoning legislation. She threatens to move her business across the water if she doesn’t get a tax break from the local warlord, who it so happens, freaking loves those bullet casing necklaces. He cuts her a midnight deal, and now the two of them maintain one of the biggest jewelry trading outfits in the entire region. She’s making the real stuff now, including possible blood diamonds from south, in the Congo, but it’s funny how the greasy southerners always seem to have a fresh story about all the opportunity there is if you just open your eyes.

Swahili Sue is better than all that. She maintains a delicate balance, paying off the right officials to keep her operation running smoothly, but she also takes care of her people. Her factory floor fairly hums, and even pregnant workers get padded chairs to sit on while they set stones, hand-embroider little suede bags, and stuff pendants into jewelry boxes. This is the reality–you can’t run a business here without feeding the monkey, and the monkey drives a lot of cars, usually bulletproof vehicles with tinted glass and built-in bars with the country’s second best Amarula and ice. Sue looks at the papers every day to know what’s coming down the road–which ethnic cleansing may clean her country’s house next, which politician she’ll want to cozy up to and which one she’ll want to steer clear of.

And at the end of the day, when she’s selling her company to a guy who thinks he’s a businessman because he ran a regional sugarcane distribution center and whose rich uncle is subsidizing him, she’ll think back to that first $2000 someone gave her, and wonder how she came so far with so little.