Baccalauréat · Série G · Anglais — 2021

TEXT — The woman with two telephones

Aminata Sawadogo has two telephones. One is for the customers, the other for the twelve young men who ride her motorcycles. She has never had an office.

Four years ago she was selling fried plantain at a road junction in Ouagadougou. She noticed that the shopkeepers around her spent their afternoons waiting for a nephew or a friend to deliver a parcel across town. « Everybody was losing time, » she says, « and nobody was selling that time. »

She borrowed four hundred thousand francs from a microfinance institution, bought one second-hand motorcycle and hired one driver. She charged one thousand francs for a delivery inside the city, and she wrote down every single one in a notebook.

Today the company makes about two hundred deliveries a day. The most difficult part, she explains, was neither the money nor the traffic: it was being taken seriously. « For two years, people asked me to speak to the manager, » she laughs. « I was the manager. »

She has just registered the business officially and opened a bank account in the company's name. « I did not do it for the tax office, » she says. « I did it because a bank does not lend to a notebook. »