By Katie Smith Milway
A boy in Ghana buys one hen with a few borrowed coins, and the book follows the money for twenty years to see what one hen turns into.
Kojo's father died when Kojo was small, so Kojo left school to help his mother gather firewood and sell it at the market. There is no spare money anywhere. Then the families in the village do something clever: they pool what little they each have and take turns lending the whole pot to one person. When Kojo's mother's turn comes, she uses most of it for her own work and hands Kojo a few coins. He buys a hen. The hen lays eggs. His family eats some and Kojo carries the rest to market and sells them, and with that money he buys another hen, and then more. A year later there are twenty-five hens and enough coming in that Kojo pays his own school fees and goes back to school. And the book keeps going, to a bank, to a much bigger loan, to a farm that grows into the largest in the region and employs a great many people, and to Kojo lending money out himself.
There is no other picture book that makes a loan visible like this. Money as an abstraction is hard, but a hen is not an abstraction: the hen is the thing Kojo bought with borrowed money, and the eggs are what the hen pays back, and a child can watch, physically, on the page, one hen turn into twenty-five. That's capital, and reinvestment, and why anyone borrows anything, all done in feathers. Milway keeps the pace on the money rather than the misery, so the poverty is stated and then the book gets on with what Kojo does. And it's true, which matters enormously to the sort of child who asks whether a story really happened. The back has a photograph of the real man, an explanation of how small loans work, and a glossary, so an older child can go further.