What do you get when you combine the cutting edge of e-commerce technology with hyperinflation, a collapsing economy, and a burgeoning humanitarian crisis? You get zimbuyer.com, a website that allows Zimbabweans in exile to make online purchases of food and other necessities for delivery to family back home, letting them know via text message that a sack of corn or cooking oil is waiting.
The website is the brainchild of a 26-year-old named Laz, who left the country in 1999 to study information technology in Texas. But by the time he was finished school, President Robert Mugabe had begun his slide into dictatorship and Zimbabwe's economy - once the healthiest in Africa - was imploding.
Laz knew there was no work back home; instead he stayed abroad and found a job at America Online. Then, last year, it occurred to him that he could put his e-commerce training to work for people back in Zimbabwe. (Like many others working in this field, Laz was afraid to have his surname published for fear of reprisal from the Zimbabwean government, which has criticized initiatives such as this that subvert what remains of the Zimbabwean economy.)
Zimbabwe, like many African countries, has long been dependent on remittances from citizens working abroad (which far exceeds the value of all foreign aid that is delivered to the continent). But these days inflation in Zimbabwe runs at 4,500 per cent, in the government estimate, or twice that, if you believe independent economists. That means that people insist on getting paid their wages daily, that an estimate from a business for work to be done is good for only 30 minutes, and that prices on restaurant menus change from the start of the lunch hour to the end.
It also means that there is little point in Zimbabweans working abroad sending cash: It must be delivered at the posted government exchange rate, rendering it almost worthless, and it loses what value it has in a matter of days.
"The only things that keep value are commodities - petrol, cooking oil, sugar - or foreign currency," said Joeseph, an expatriate Zimbabwean who works in the Alberta oil patch and who uses zimbuyer.com regularly to send parcels to relatives. "And if you don't send help, how are they going to survive?"
So, suddenly there is a thriving business in websites such as this which allow people to send commodities back home, and to help their families negotiate the increasing scarcities in Zimbabwe by electronically providing them with cellphone airtime or fuel vouchers.
On zimbuyer.com, Joeseph can place an order for pork chops, or school notebooks or a generator, and pay for it with a credit card or the Web-based service PayPal. Laz and his staff then e-mail the order through to Harare immediately, and their local team goes into action: Six staffers in Harare and four in Bulawayo physically fill the orders - they are outside the shops at 5 a.m., scouting out a rumoured shipment of cooking oil. When they can't find products to fill an order in Zimbabwe, they cross into South Africa or Botswana and import the products, facing the crippling import taxes and bribes that go with that - but Laz said they are insulated to some degree because their buyers have purchased in foreign exchange. Deliveries are made within 72 hours. (Business could get more complicated in the coming weeks, however, as Mr. Mugabe has deployed riot police to enforce government price controls, which he blames for inflation; as a consequence many shop owners say they simply will not restock.)
