Simon-Jan Terpstra
Monday I arrived in a very warm Bamako. At noon it is already over 35 degrees, it can be over 40 degrees. It took me a little time to get used to these temperatures. Somebody from the Mango Taskforce picked me up from the airport and brought me to my hotel.
Bamako is an impressive city. This isn’t based on its architecture. Bamako is a flat city and there are only a couple of tall buildings. It is the people here who are so impressive. Many women are beautifully dressed in colorful clothes.
All the business that goes on here happens on the side of the streets. Almost everything is sold on the streets: telephone cards, goats and chickens, furniture, vegetables and fruit.
This week I saw somebody transporting his goat on his motorcycle. A short time later I saw somebody transporting 200 kilograms of rice in the same way! It seems that everyone here is trying to earn an income with their own small business. This is because there is very little work available. The average income is below USD 1,000 a year.
The taskforce I am working with consists of four exporters, the Dutch embassy, Mali trade, a construction company, and three governmental teams. It was very at first trying to understand the role that everyone plays in the project and I think that this was true not only if me. Everyone involved is pointing at each other when we are talking about responsibilities. As we expected, things are not that well organized.
It is really astonishing that so many different teams of people want to give their assistance, but nobody is actually managing the whole project. Each team focuses on their own part. Probably it will take a few more weeks before we can finally start exporting mangos to the Netherlands by boat.
I hope we can make some progression in the construction of the pack house the next week. Furthermore I want to get a good view on the quality of the mango tree fields and transport of the exporters.
One of the things that was most astonishing to me is that way the construction company is working. They won their role the project from the main sponsor: the Dutch Embassy. Time and time again the timeline for finalizing all of their work for the project has been delayed for all sorts of reasons.
Just this week they discovered they needed a power cable for a cooling engines. Unbelievable!!! I think this really should have been realized sooner and everything they are doing could have been planned a lot better. All of these delays frustrate the planning for the project and they frustrate me as well, especially as it looks like it might be Dutch participants who are slowing the project down.
In any event I hope that the Dutch embassy demands a fast solution from the construction company. As I said, not everything is planned very well here. I expected that in Africa this isn’t a new problem.
For eight weeks starting in April 2007 Albert Heijn supermarket manager Simon-Jan Terpstra is working to help the management of a mango packaging factory in Bamako as part of a pilot project for Albert Heijn, which, if the results after favorable will continue in 2008.
This is the second time mangos from Mali will be exported to the Netherlands for Albert Heijn. Last year it was one container with 20,000 tons of mangoes. This year the plan is to export eight containers.
Simon-Jan started working for Ahold in 2005 as an Ahold management trainee. In his first year he was project manager in the Albert Heijn Supply Chain and the, in his second year, an assistant supermarket manager for Albert Heijn. Since November 2006 he has been a supermarket manager.
Next to his work for Albert Heijn, Simon-Jan volunteers for an organization called World Servants, which carries out building projects with hundreds of volunteers in several developing countries, helping to construct facilities such as schools, health clinics or homes with people from the local community.