First week of internship

Written: March 28th, 2022

The classes portion of my program is now finished and I started an internship last week. I am placed in a financial institution called Cofina. It is a mix of a classic bank and microfinance institution with a focus on extending credit to businesses in 8 different African countries and France. It’s been super interesting to compare banks in the United States with institutions here since the informer sector makes up about 65% of Senegal’s GDP, and therefore institutions must find ways to make business with them. Since a large portion of the cliental does not have proper papers, Cofina relies on sales receipts, bills, and lots of field visits (to look at inventory) to assess the creditworthiness of a potential client (no credit scores here!). If clients do not keep track of this information, institutions will teach clients how to, so it’s also a way of financial education. Last week I shadowed more of the client-facing side and got to go on some client visits to a property manager, fabric seller, and shoemaker.

I also shadowed the credit department which spends most of its day getting signatures from clients and their guarantors. I noticed that it’s really important to have solid guarantees here and a lot of work goes into verifying the value and making sure loans are properly guaranteed. At first, it seemed like lots of back and forth, meeting clients for 5 seconds to get a signature, or driving all over Dakar for a 5-minute visit, but the man I was shadowing made the comment that the reasoning is because most of the time people don’t have email so it’s the only way to get verification. If they have email then it’s not necessary to meet face to face.

Most conversations are in Wolof so that was interesting… per usual I didn’t know what was going on but just smile a lot and look at the numbers since that is the same. However, one day I was asked to enter numbers into a spreadsheet, but it took me forever because the 2s and 9s look the exact same to me so again, a simple task took double the time.

The employers were super welcoming towards me so that was nice. We eat lunch together every day at a woman’s house who cooks for the office. The first day I went there was interesting. I was shadowing the exploitation department which is all men so when it was time to eat, they just told me to get up and follow them (a nice lady told them to make sure I ate so thanks to her I even got lunch, haha). This was before I knew that the lady cooked for the office every day, so I just started walking down the street with the group (I had no idea where we were going) and we just walked into someone’s house. I think we got some interesting looks as I was a small girl following a group of very big men down the street. The food was so delicious, but the guys just talked to themselves in Wolof the entire time so I ate my rice and fish in silence in the corner. I was so confused, but the rest of the week went much better as they started to sprinkle in some French so I could get the general idea of the conversation. Although most of the conversations are about cars so I really don’t have much to add anyways. This morning I went back to the office, but I’m in a different department so they put me in a car and sent me to a new building. I will be shadowing the marketing team this week so I’m sure I’ll learn a lot more! I am currently writing from my desk to pass the time and I honestly have no clue which part of Dakar I am in, however, I know what to say to the taxi to get home so I’m banking on that. Hopefully tonight I can figure out how to get back here!

Unrelated to my internship in Dakar, but we went exploring downtown this weekend and I found the office of the company I will be interning with in Minneapolis this summer so that was a fun connection :) (the picture below)