Resilience

Kenya‘s Sarafu-Credit: Alternative Economies and Community Currencies Part 2.

By Niko Georgiades, originally published by P2P Foundation      December 7, 2017

Second of a three part series, Niko Georgiades takes on a journey through Greece’s post-capitalist alt. economy, this time by way of Kenya. Originally published in Unicorn Riot Ninja.

Athens, Greece – Experimenting with alternatives to capitalism has continued to become more popular as huge wealth divides devour chances of relieving poverty across the world. During the summer of 2017, a speaking engagement at the self-organized squat of Embros Theater in Athens, Greece, showcased alternatives to capitalism. In the second of our three part series on alternative economies and community currencies, we spotlight Kenya’s Sarafu-Credit.

Community currencies are types of complimentary currencies shared within a community that are utilized as a means of countering inequality, class, debt, accumulation, and exclusion.

With community currencies, lower-income communities are given the ability to improve living standards by building infrastructure sustainability through networks of sharing, providing access to interest-free loans, and increasing the economic viability of the community.

This is a major departure from conventional national currencies. Most are generated today through fractional reserve banking, wherein units (“broad money” or M3) are created at the bank when loans are instantiated and destroyed upon repayment.

Caroline Dama, Board member of Grassroots Economics

During economic slowdowns including the US Great Depression, the “velocity of money” drops as fractional currency is unavailable. Locally issued “Depression Scrip” substituted for fractional money in the 1930s. Today alternative currencies that improve velocity of money by distributing credit creation power to the whole population are taking root in many countries.

The first speaker of the discussion at Embros Theater was Caroline Dama, a Board member of Grassroots Economics (GE). GE is a “non-profit foundation that seeks to empower marginalized communities to take charge of their own livelihoods and economic future” in Kenya.

Will Ruddick, who started the Eco-Pesa (no longer in circulation), a complementary and community currency, founded Grassroots Economics in 2010, which has created six networks of community currencies that now works with over twenty schools and twelve hundred businesses in Kenya.

In 2013, 200 businesses, 75% of which were owned by women, became part of the new self-organized and self-determined community currency, Bangla-Pesa, in Mombasa’s largest slum, Bangladesh.

Kenya’s government quickly saw the formation of these community currencies as a threat. Five individuals involved with Bangla-Pesa, including Will Ruddick and Caroline Dama, were implicated on charges of undermining the national currency, the shilling. They were all eventually cleared of all charges and the Sarafu-Credit system continues to break new boundaries and change the narrative of alternative economic systems.

Sarafu Credit – Bengla-Pesa

Drastic economic and social inequalities run rampant throughout Kenya as at least 46 percent of its population is living in poverty. With basic needs like clean water and healthcare becoming hard to attain, the Sarafu-Credit community currency system was created as a safety net for citizens to improve living conditions.

The word sarafu means currency in the Kiswahilli language. Sarafu-Credit is a system of community currencies used as a “regional means of exchange supplementing the national currency system.”

The community in Bangladesh, the biggest slum in Kenya’s second largest city, Mombasa, is very poor and has little access to the shilling, the national currency. Caroline Dama, from GE, stated that the community is “able to come together and come up with a system to exchange our goods and services” using “community dollars.”

These community currencies are complimentary with the national currency and Caroline stated that not all of them work towards abolishing the current currency or system, but that they are “trying to make sure that the community banks have a way to survive in times that they wouldn’t otherwise survive.”

“it’s a form of community governance and self-taxation … the community has been able to come up with its own rules to solve its own problems.” – Caroline

How the Sarafu-Credit system works

GE explains Sarafu-Credit as: “A network of businesses, schools, self-employed and informal sector workers form a cooperative whose profits and inventory are issued as vouchers for social and environmental services as well as an interest-free credit to community members. These vouchers circulate in the community and can be used at any shop, school, clinic or cooperative businesses and form a stable medium of exchange when the Kenyan Shilling is lacking. This injection of money into the community in the form of a community currency, based on local assets, increases local sales and helps directly develop the local economy. Sarafu-Credit, Grassroots Economics’ Kenyan Community Currency program, creates stable markets based on local development and trust.”

Caroline stated that only with a bottom-up approach can the community create economic equality. “Communities thrive when they are able to make their own decisions.”

“Community currency gives that power to the people because they are talking to each other, they are able to exchange, and now they are meeting their basic needs, they have enough to sell and when they sell they can pool their resources together to build that better school.” – Caroline

Graph of how the Community Currency Vouchers operates

“If we have problems in the society we want to deal with … what we do, is we can come together as businesses instead of waiting for the government to do it for us”, said Caroline, who stressed the importance of self-determination and community empowerment.

The community currency vouchers are issued for social services and mutual credit for all sustainable needs of the community.  According to the Grassroots Economics website, “The community currency circulates around the community helping to connect local supply and demand for people who lack regular access to national currency.”

Furthermore, Caroline gave an example of women in a village collectively working on projects together, like helping each other build new houses. They would make each person in their network a new house and they would gather the material needed to build the house from other cooperative businesses.

There was a lively discussion with plenty of questions after the presentation on Sarafu-Credit’s Bangla-Pesa. One of the many questions focused on hatching new ideas around sharing-based communities, instead of exchange based communities that could present inequalities based on the ability of services to exchange. Caroline said,

“We are trying to move into a community whereby we are recognizing individual talents … that there is diversity in the community and that we should move away from the idea that we should monetize that. We try to live in a community that recognizes peoples needs, not monetizing them.” – Caroline

Grassroots Economics have created a .pdf with their user guide and have plenty of resources on their website. The video below shows how the Bangla-Pesa works.

To hear the full speech and question session of Sarafu-Credit click here.
For further reading on the Bangla-Pesa, here are a few attention-worthy papers:

• Complementary Currencies for Sustainable Development in Kenya: The Case of the Bangla-Pesa(PDF)
• Re-imagining Money to Broaden the Future of Development Finance – What Kenyan Community Currencies Reveal is Possible for Financing Development(PDF)
• Trust and Spending of Community Currencies in Kenya(PDF)

Daily Kos

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) Begins To Realize The Terrible Mistake She Made

By Dartagnan       December 08, 2017

No wonder she doesn’t look happy. She screwed Mainers and herself.

You may recall Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) basking in the limelight last week during the run-up to the GOP’s vote to ram through its catastrophic tax giveaway to corporations and other Billionaires at the expense of the rest of the American public.

As one of the so-called “moderate” Republicans, her vote was solicited with tender care by Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, who apparently promised her that the American middle class might, just might still retain some meager crumbs left over from his Party’s loot-fest of the public treasury in the form of keeping their property tax and medical expense deductions. She also obtained an “assurance” from McConnell that a 4% cut to Medicare would certainly never be included in the final Bill, once it was reconciled with the version devised by the good, caring Republicans in the House. Hey, she had it in writing!

“There’s a real fear that the tax bill is going to trigger a 4% cut in Medicare,” Collins added. “I am absolutely certain that 4% cut in Medicare that I mentioned will not occur. I have it in writing from both the Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and also Senator Mitch McConnell.”

But even these tiny, miserable morsels casually tossed to ordinary Americans were coldly eliminated and deemed too much of a sacrifice to the Super-yacht class and their proxies in the Republican Congress:

News reports this week revealed that House Speaker Paul Ryan told congressional staff after the Senate vote that he was not a party to McConnell’s promise to pass the provisions that Collins demanded.

“She made a political error that’s going to cost Mainers and cost people across the country basic lifelines while [helping] the wealthy,” said [Marie Follaytar] Smith,” [an activist and co-founder of Mainers for Accountable Leadership].

In fact it’s absolutely clear that Medicare is next on the chopping block for Ryan’s willing executioners, precisely as a result of the tax scheme Collins voted for:

As the tax cut legislation passed by the Senate early Saturday hurtles toward final approval, Republicans are preparing to use the swelling deficits made worse by the package as a rationale to pursue their long-held vision: undoing the entitlements of the New Deal and Great Society, leaving government leaner and the safety net skimpier for millions of Americans.

Now faced with a severe backlash back home, the former It-girl with well-known aspirations for the Maine Governorship is feverishly backtracking on her blunder:

Republican Sen. Susan Collins said she may change her vote on the Senate tax bill if amendments she added are not included in the final bill.

Collins believes the amendments she added in the Senate version on property tax and medical expense deduction for retirement funding improved the bill and that in time, it will lower the debt.

But as she told WMTW’s media partner, WABI, if those changes are not included in the final package, she will consider changing her vote.

That’s what tends to happen when you have nine religious leader activists getting themselves arrested occupying your office back home to protest what can most charitably be described as your utter naiveté if not outright stupidity:

It was the second group of protesters this week to be arrested in the offices of Maine’s senior senator while urging her to reject the sweeping changes to the federal tax code that are presently being negotiated in Washington, D.C. On Monday, police arrested five protesters, who had staged a sit-in at Collins’ Bangor office.

But the problem for Collins is that the GOP doesn’t need her anymore. With Mike Pence available to break any ties, and Bob Corker (R-TN) the only recorded Republican “no” vote in the Senate, they already have the votes to pass this monstrosity without her, in whatever mutated form the House disgorges back.

Instead, when Collins comes home and settles down in front of the TV with a nice cup of cocoa this holiday season, she’ll be treated to this ad sponsored by a group called Save My Care:

“Senator Collins said Republican leaders promised her they would fix things,” the narrator intones, while headlines about resistance in the House to her bills flash on the screen. “Now we know they lied to her and Mainers will suffer the consequences.”

But had she done the right thing by her constituents to begin with instead of trusting in a Party that actively recruits child molesters into its ranks, she wouldn’t be in the position she finds herself now, when it’s too late.

UPI

U.N. official: Alabama’s poverty, sewage crisis ‘very uncommon in First World’

By Ray Downs        December 10, 2017

Open sewage in rural Alabama has been blamed for spreading diseases like hookworm and E. Coli. Photo by Philip Alston/UN/Twitter

December 10, 2017 (UPI) — A United Nations official investigating poverty in the United States visited Alabama last week and said the poverty and sewage system problems there are some of the worst he has seen in the developed world.

“I think it’s very uncommon in the First World. This is not a sight that one normally sees,” said Philip Alston, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human right, AL.com reported. “I’d have to say that I haven’t seen this.”

Alston is on a 15-day trip of the United States to investigate poverty and visited several counties in Alabama’s “Black Belt” region, a mostly black region that hag long experienced poverty and racial segregation.

One of the issues Alston focused on was the longstanding sewage crisis there.

“Lowndes County in rural Alabama, I saw homes that are not connected to public sewage systems, whose owners can’t afford to install septic tanks,” Alston tweeted Friday. “Many resort to digging ditches & straight piping waste water to within meters of homes, posing serious health risks.”

Local resident and activist Aaron Thigpen has lived in the Black Belt region his entire life, according to AL.com. He showed Alston where he lives — an area where diseases like E. Coli and hookworm, which are both eradicated in most of the country, thrive because there is scarce access to clean drinking water due to the sewage problem.

“These two pipes are the raw sewage pipes coming from the house. And you’ve got your main water line here, and it may have a hole in it, so everyone gets sick all at once,” Thigpen said. “It’s really bad when you’ve got a lot of kids around like there are here. They’re playing ball and the ball goes into the raw sewage, and they don’t know the importance of not handling sewage.”

According to the 2017 Alabama Poverty Data Sheet, nearly 20 percent of Alabamians live below the federal poverty line; nine counties have a poverty rate higher than 30 percent; and the child food insecurity rate is 24 percent (the national average is 18 percent).

Alston said he wants his visit to increase awareness of poverty in the United States, including rural Alabama.

“The hope is that we’ll bring attention to [these problems], just like we bring attention to people who are being tortured,” he said.

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