Kenya 2010 and the Road Ahead

Over the next month and a half I'll be traveling (have been traveling) to Kenya to help coordinate and teach the Sauder School of Business Africa Initiative:Social Entrepreneurship 101. As I have mentioned before, this program is about teaching business planning and entrepreneurship to Kenyan youth. We work primarily out of Nairobi and have a focus on Kibera, one of the largest slums in Africa.

While last year I was simply (though not so simple, ha) teaching at one of our partner sites, this is my sophomore year and I have been promoted to act as a team coordinator. What does that mean? Well, hopefully growth. In the past, only Kirby Leong has returned as an alum to help coordinate (and he has again for a 3rd year!). Adding another coordinator means we can get more done from a networking and administrative perspective over the next few weeks to help move our program goals along and develop a more stable post program for our students and their success.

While we are very luck to have fantastic partners in the Strathmore University students here in Nairobi helping us co-teach and mentor, once we have left, it's clear that many of our SE101 students have limited capacity to continue without stronger mentorship and research resources. Our Strathmore students are just that, students, much like I was when I first participated in SE101 (though I was an MBA and they are undergraduates as well). Their lives are busy with school and work and the demands of being a Kenyan, which for all intents and purposes, I feel, is considerably more demanding than being a student in Canada. Moreover, without a dedicated location for SE101 students to visit and a dedicated individual(s) coordinating volunteers, their meetings are sporadic, making it difficult to address the needs of a start-up (and most typically, first-time) entrepreneur. Additionally, the research costs of starting a business for our students can be considerable. Given the economic welfare of the average Kenyan (and even more challenging, one from Kibera), doing the market research; securing access to the internet for research, email and word processing; and producing a printed finalized plan can be a considerable challenge, stretching their planning over a time horizon that crushes their motivation and hope.

The road ahead for the Sauder Africa Initiative, in my opinion, really needs to be two specific steps:

1. Look to establish specific revenue streams to support our goals
2. Establish a more permanent and dedicated resource center for both out volunteers and students

Ultimately, those will be the two focal points of my time here in Kenya for 2010. While I will also be in the classroom and supporting our incoming student learning. We have a full crop of freshman Sauder SE101 teachers who are more than capable of delivering our curriculum and helping stoke the entrepreneurial fires of this years Kenyan participants with the amazing curriculum our past teams have helped to create.

Please follow along by checking out our facebook, twitter, youtube and blog over the weeks to come. And please remember, we might be in Kenya now, but it is never to late to contribute and be a part of our success. Donations (cash and in-kind) are always welcome and tax deductible.

Ninitz Kerosene Is Launched

Today we managed to clear all of the hurdles to launch Patrick's business, Ninitz Kerosene. For the record, this business was started for 7525 Ksh ($119). Before we distributed the rest of the money, we wanted to see Patrick's receipts for the rent and the tank, as well as get Mma Agnes, owner of Kibera Kerosene, from whom we'd purchase 100 liters of kerosene, to agree to mentor Patrick. The photo shows, from left to right, Patrick, Agnes, an employee filling Patrick's tank, and Henry.

I explained to Agnes how those of us who had been here last year really wanted to help him start his business, but that we were also concerned that he didn't really know how to run a business. Henry explained to her that we wanted Patrick to deposit with her on a daily basis an amount equivalent to the cost of what he'd sold for the day. This would insure that when his tank emptied, he'd already have the money on deposit for his next tank of kerosene. She agreed to do so, offering to write up receipts and keep a book for him to keep him going. I was overjoyed.

Once the deals were completed, we had a wonderful conversation with Agnes about her business. She's been in business for about four years, and is one of the three large suppliers of kerosene in Kibera (otherwise one has to go into town for large amounts). She said that Patrick was lucky because she'd started with a loan that she was still repaying (that said, I think she's actually doing reasonably well--interest can be from 12-18%, which is likely why her loan continues.) She is mainly a wholesaler, and it turned out that she'd actually given us her wholesale price, because that’s how her tanks are set for dispensing kerosene. This was really kind on her part.

Agnes discussed how difficult it had been to start her business. Initially friends had promised to support her, but when she actually went to them, no one would help her. She eventually managed to scrape together what she needed. Once she started making some money, though, her friends started coming to her for money. She said the whole thing taught her a lesson about who you can trust and who your friends are. She also said that the only one you can really talk to about your problems is God, and although he doesn't send an obvious answer, he will listen. It was really interesting to hear her talk like this.

Agnes also said that she was always very careful with her business, mainly reinvesting in the business, rather than taking out money for herself. I kept looking at Patrick, trying to make sure that he was hearing her messages (because they were definitely better coming from her than from me). We asked her whether Patrick's business could be successful, and she assured us that he should have no problem, as long as he reinvested his earnings, rather than simply spent them. She also said it should be pretty easy for him to grow. We closed on an upbeat note--Agnes asked when we would be back next year, and she predicted that we could have a party to celebrate Patrick's success, and that she wanted to be at that party.

I do hope she'll mentor him during this difficult time. Running a business is not easy, and it requires discipline. I've actually put in more effort than Patrick this week to get his business off the ground, as did Henry. I wonder if he knows that. We should all hope for the best.

Posted by Nancy Langton

Doing Business in Kibera

Both Friday and today I had to journey through Kibera by foot in the hopes of helping to set up the business of one of our participants from last year. Part of this experience has been really fun. Today, while walking along one of the streets, I was stopped by three people, all of whom called me by name. Felix, who works at my hotel; Lawrence, who owns the matatu we used last year to get back and forth from Kibera; and Cartoon, one of last year's participants. On Friday, I ran into two of the other participants from last year. They all give huge smiles and loud, friendly greetings and handshakes. Kibera houses nearly a million people. I can't think of a time I encountered three people I knew on the same day while walking a street in Vancouver. There are not that many white people who pass through in the course of the day, so I'm easily recognized.

However, trying to set up a business here is not an easy task. In this situation, our team is trying to fund Patrick, who wants to start Nimitz Kerosene, which will sell small quantities of kerosene to individuals who can only afford to buy enough to cook one meal at a time. He is the only participant from last year who mostly completed a business plan, and one that showed that a profit was fairly easy to attain. We are committed to trying to set up a successful business so that we can show that our training can make a difference.

It is difficult to know how much of what feels like an almost impossible challenge is due to simple (!) cultural differences, and how much arises due to the unwillingness to just hand out money to a person starting a business. Our concern is that we really want Patrick's business to start--we don't want him to just take our money and use it for other purposes. The amount of money we're talking about is roughly $160 (10,000 Kenyan shillings.)

Trying to convince Patrick that he really does need to show us the receipt for the rent he paid (and trying to convince the purported landlord of the same) took about an hour. We didn't get a receipt at the end of that conversation. Henry, a Kenyan partner who is trying to help our team launch a successful business, interrogated them both, after I'd already done so before he arrived. I encouraged him to do it in Swahili, even though it would mean that I didn't understand the conversation. I figured he could assess honesty in "native" language better than I could do so in English. In the end, we agreed that the rent receipt must be produced at our next meeting.

Then we were off to buy 100 liters of kerosene, a tank to hold it, and small polyethelene bags (think baggies with twist ties!) Nothing is ever easy, though. The woman we'd met on Friday who is to sell us the kerosene wasn't around. One of her employees was. Should we buy from him or wait for her (because we need her to guarantee that if for some reason Patrick doesn't actually accept delivery of the kerosene, but wants the money instead, the money has to come back to us.) We'd also like to ask her to mentor him, so that each day, he deposits with her the cost of the kerosene he's sold that day (keeping the profits himself), so that by the time the first tank of kerosene is sold, he's put on deposit all the money needed to buy the next one.

Stymied on that front, we try to do something else--purchase the polyethelene bags that will hold the small quantities of kerosene. An old, rugged looking guy arrives at the kerosene depot after a five minute wait, carrying a very heavy bag filled with packets of baggies in a variety of sizes. Bargaining begins, all in Swahili. I can tell that the bargaining is not going well, at least for my side. The seller seems to think he has the edge. I whisper to Henry, "it's because I'm standing here," which he acknowledges. White people can afford to pay much higher prices, or at least that's what the seller is using as his bargaining strategy. He accurately assumes that I must be involved somehow, or I wouldn't be standing there. Henry tries to explain to him that the bags are not for me, but for Patrick. Somehow a price is arrived at that Henry deems fair, and then of course, I shell out the money ($3.87), living up to the stereotype: white people have the money.

We learn of a good price on the kerosene tank (1000 Kenyan shillings, or about $16), though it's sold at a shop near Bahati, our other teaching site. I decide that we can probably get our cab driver to pick it up for us during one of our daily trips. Then Patrick claims that he's already ordered the tank from elsewhere (meaning we're supposed to give him the money for it.) This was not in our plan (which was mainly to purchase his supplies, not give him any cash). So, we finally decide to give him the money for the tank, but not the money for his sign, and a few other things (all of these other things came to an amount equivalent to the cost of the tank). Instead, he'll have to produce the tank and the receipt before we go any further along in this business venture.

Before finishing for the day, we make Patrick sign a document acknowledging receipt of the money, and acknowledging that it's a loan which he must start paying off within a week, at $1.60 a week. At first he tries to beg that we give him a three-month grace period before he begins to repay the loan, but we do not budge. There is no interest charged. We tell him that if he misses any payments we will liquidate his assets to get our loan repaid. This is a high finance operation, afterall.

As I write this, I consider that maybe we should have just given the entire $160 away. Henry is a business consultant here in Nairobi, and I have a good salary in Canada. We have now spent 12 hours collectively trying to make sure we don't lose $160. And we're not even done. And, if I want to collect on the default, I may need to add on the cost of an airplane ticket to Nairobi. Or send Henry.

Mentoring entrepreneurs is hard work!

Posted by Nancy Langton

Routines and Surprises

Like Nancy mentioned in the previous post, our team has really settled into a routine this week which probably does account for our lack of blog postings. Our second week of teaching ended with a bang as Art finally taught his first and final class! Despite his usually calm demeanor, Art did an energetic job of both entertaining the students and ensuring that they understood the fundamentals of Daily Operations. While it's sad that he's leaving our team today, we congratulate him as he embarks on a year-long opportunity to teach English in Japan!

At the Kibera site this week, our teaching team was really able to bond with the participants. On Wednesday of this week, instead of our usual afternoon mentoring session, Kevin and I were able to be part of an impromptu discussion on Kenyan politics, standard of living and current events with our students. By just listening to the discussion, I was able to learn so much about our students and their desire to effect change in their lives. I think that discussion really helped our teaching team understand a lot more about the background of our students and helped our class as a whole bond together. I found out that many of the students in our class did not know each other before the course. Yesterday, we had another opportunity to get to know our students better through the soccer/football game. One of our students is a soccer coach so he arranged a field and equipment for our class. It was an informal game but a great time of fun and bonding for all who participated.

Perhaps the most memorable this week was my conversation with one of the quietest students in our class during the walk back to the classroom from the soccer field. While we walked, she openly shared with me how her mother had passed away several years ago and that she was now living with a stepmother and taking care of her younger brothers and sisters. She was unable to finish school and had only completed up to Form 2. She told me how much she appreciated this course as it provided an opportunity for her to think differently and to be successful at business. Just knowing that we had made some difference in this young woman's life was enough to convince me that it was worth all the preparation and hours of hard work back home to come to Kenya.

I hope that the last week of teaching will be just as good as the last two. More updates soon!

Posted by Alvina

photoBLOG

Thank you all for your patience, we finally have the time to post some pictures from our busy days teaching! These pictures are from Kibera and we will soon upload photos from Kimathi and our weekend adventures.

Posted by Alvina

Day Three: On Solid Ground in a Shaky City

[This blog entry has been adapted from a mass e-mail sent to family and friends. Apologies for the personal tone.]

Hello dearest family and friends!

First thing's first: I'm alive and well, even in spite of the earthquakes. For those of you that haven't heard, there was an earthquake on the Tanzanian-Kenyan border, and its aftershocks have been hitting Nairobi for the past week. Yesterday the quake on the border registered a 6.0 on the Richter scale (that's high), with a proportional aftershock in town. I kid you not: I haven't felt a thing. Guess I'm too busy bouncing off the walls to feel the ground shake. :)

So, to the gist of things: I've been working in Kibera for three days now, and it's been nothing short of amazing. The students span the spectrum of ages, education and life experience, and yet are active, participating, and really really inspiring. Here are a few stories:

Peter is 24, and didn't graduate from high school. He completed grade 10 but was forced to flee his home in southern Kenya when his family's land was raided and stolen. Given his incredible entrepreneurial talent, he started a dvd shop in Kibera, and has been doing well supporting himself. He's noticed, however, that the market is getting saturated, so wants to focus his attention elsewhere. He hopes to start a mini-farm and become an inexpensive wholesaler to local retailers, to provide a more affordable food source for his community.

Roseline is 22 and did graduate from high school. She's currently employed in a pharmacy, and hopes to open her own mini-pharmacy to provide more affordable medicine to the community. Through her employer, she's learned the ins and outs of the business, has met prospective suppliers, and has saved enough of her own money to cover the entirety of her start-up costs, minus the first month's rent and start-up inventory. She wrote in her mission statement that part of the reason she wants to start her own pharmacy ('chemists', they're called) is to earn enough money to avoid resorting to 'evil ways', which was later explained to me to be sex trade work. Apparently in Kibera, that's not uncommon.

Peter and Roseline are only a couple of examples of the students we're working with (I feel like this is beginning to sound like a World Vision commercial). The honest-to-god truth is that all of their stories are really incredible, and that for many of them, all they need is some business training and no more than $100 US (about 7,000 Kenyan shillings) to get their ideas off the ground. There were 22 students at my site on the first day, and that's been whittled down to about 12 given drop-outs, but the 12 that remain are here to stay. I only hope that our microfinancing partner, Ebony Foundation, will come up with the capital, support and monitoring, to make sure they make it.

So that's what I've been up to lately. So far my role has been to support the UBC and Kenyan university students on my team while they teach their assigned workshops (we've covered Intro to Business Plans and Marketing I), and to provide mentoring in the afternoons to 3 or 4 participants. I take over the teaching on Friday - Finance I - which should be really interesting, given they're not the world's simplest concepts, but I'm really trying not to underestimate them.

In fact, on that note, here's some interesting facts about the Kenyan education system that I found just bewildering. Background: a 'C' in high school is considered a decent grade, a 'B' is really good, and an 'A' is nothing short of exceptional. The way it was described to me, 'A' students are the top of the top of the class. It used to be the case that the entrance requirement for university in Kenya was a 'C' in Form 4, your final year of high school. Due to over-enrolment, instead of building more spaces for more students, the government simply raised the entrance requirement to deal with the problem - to an A. And in Kenya, I'm told that if you don't have a degree, you're 'a nobody'.

Which means that Kibera and other slums in Kenya are chock full of solid students, students who in Canada would be averaging a solid B+/A-. These people aren't just intelligent and talented, they're also reasonably well-educated, but because they didn't get the opportunity to pursue post-secondary education - either because of entrance cut-offs or very steep tuition fees with virtually zero financial aid - they're in the slums, trying to get by. The injustice is palpable.

But I want to make clear that Kibera isn't doom and gloom. In fact, one of the most remarkable things about the place is that it really is a city unto itself - complete with its own law courts - and that other than the condition of the infrastructure, it could be any other city in Kenya. It's the mud walls, the corrugated iron roofs and the lack of basic infrastructure (water, electricity, etc.) that give it away. Nonetheless, it's there, it's bustling, and people are making do.

In other news, my journal is mad at me. It's frustrated that I haven't been able to put a half-decent entry together for it in a while, because I keep falling asleep while writing in it. I even went as far as to sit at the table in my room for a solid hour well before bedtime trying to make up for three days of neglect, and I still didn't make it. Just goes to show that the days have been long, and the nights have been short. Somehow typing seems to keep me up, but for the purposes of posterity, I'm going to have to start writing in the morning before school.

And last but not least, I'm thoroughly disappointed in the tolerance level of my UBC peers for the weather. No, it's not to hot. If you can believe it, a handful of Canadians from Vancouver, BC are finding Kenya too cold! In fairness, Nairobi is at a pretty high elevation, and it's 'winter' here right now, but I'm having trouble believing that the slight chill is anything more than a decent spring or autumn day in Toronto. I guess it's just these thin-blooded Vancouverites that have yet to experience the true meaning of winter in Canada (then again, as a bred-in-the-bone Torontonian, have I? :).

So, that's all the news that's fit to print. The food is great, the people are nice, and I recently purchased the Lonely Planet guide to Swahili, to satisfy my intense itch to pick up more of the language than just 'hello', 'goodbye', and 'thanks'. I'm in the process of mastering some basic verbs and sentence constructions, but until then, I'll just have to be satisfied with my expertise in the area of one through ten.

Until then, be well, lala salama, and chao! (Yep, for those in the know, Swahili has roots in Spanish.)

From Shakesville, East Africa,
Kevin K. (on behalf of the SE101 Team).

Posted by Kevin Keystone

Meeting the Partners

'Twas an early morning wake-up for some of the team members, and not
so early for others. We discovered that breakfast is from 7 am to
9:30 am, and as jet lag took its toll, some of us didn't quite make it
in time! Breakfast was nice and basic - toast, eggs, jam, the usual -
but Brent the caffeine fiend quickly noticed something amiss: no
coffee! And no tea! We quickly put two and two together -
Seventh-Day Adventists (who run the guesthouse we're staying in) don't
indulge in caffeine! Brent is currently plotting other ways to get his
morning fix.

A note on the guesthouse: we're staying at the LMS Guesthouse and
Conference Centre, and LMS stands for Literature Ministry Seminary (as
the bibles in our room informed us). We discovered rather quickly,
however, that it's normally referred to as the SDA House, when not
a soul had heard of LMS That made it awfully difficult to tell our
taxi drivers where to take us, although fortunately we're just up the
street from the Integrity Centre, a well-known civic landmark. The
place is great - clean, secure, and if you wait long enough for the
heaters to kick in, hot water showers - and we even have internet
access. The only hiccups were when Jim's closet door fell off, and
Kevin nearly flooded the bathroom because the shower didn't drain
quickly enough, but otherwise, home sweet home.

Our first order of business today was at 1 pm, when we met with our
partners from Daystar University and the Ebony Foundation. It was
great to finally meet the students we would be working with, until we
found out that they unfortunately were all in summer school, and would
only be able to collaborate on evenings and weekends. The student
president of SIFE - Students for International Free Enterprise - is
hoping to find more students who would be able to team-teach with us
during the week, but it looks like we might be on our own.
Nonetheless, we had the opportunity to walk through our workshops with
the students from Daystar, and was that ever helpful! We were able to
clear up the translation of some key words into Swahili, and learn
more about how business is generally conducted in Kenya and East
Africa. Within a short hour, we had already made huge progress in
tailoring our workshops to make them more accessible for our
participants. We certainly hope we'll continue working with Daystar
throughout the project.

At 2:30 pm, our next meeting was with our second site partner, the
Kimathi Information Centre (KIC). We met with Jose and Carthy from
KIC, and Kathleen from the International Development Research Centre
(IDRC), a Government of Canada outfit in Nairobi. Kathleen put us in
touch with KIC because she heard about our project through a friend
from Canada, since she's a Sauder grad! She graduated with a BCom a
few years ago, and has been doing some very interesting research over
the past six months on microfinancing, as well as the social impact of
cell phone usage, for her masters program at a university in South Africa.
In fact, she just came back from doing field work in Mozambique. It
was great to meet a Canadian working in Nairobi and find out about work
in East Africa that some of us might be doing one day!

And thank goodness Kathleen put us in touch with KIC - Jose and
Carthy were absolutely amazing! Their energy and enthusiasm for
the project was just overwhelming, and although only in their late
20s, both of them have done terrific work with local youth, pulling
off a nearly 200-person youth symposium with absolutely no budget.
All of the youth that we'll be working with at our second site in
Kimathi are a direct product of the youth symposium, and each already
have their own ideas about what business they hope to start! Based on
current registration, the stats for our Kimathi participants are as
follows: 1/3rd are women; the majority are 18 years old, with the
highest age at 35; most have high school education, a few have
university-level education; and they're all deeply motivated. We're
very excited about working with KIC and have high hopes for their
participants!

So, all in all, a very exciting and productive day. We met with each
of our partners, confirmed many of our arrangements and worked on
details still to be sorted out. We'll be meeting again with the Ebony
Foundation and Daystar tomorrow to confirm whether we'll be
team-teaching with Daystar students, and how many sites in Kibera
we'll be able to cover. Once final arrangements are confirmed, we'll
have a much better idea of what the next three weeks will look like.

And either way, Monday is game time!

Many of us are starting to feel a little nervous, since most of us
have pretty limited teaching experience, let alone teaching in another
country. After this week, though, we're sure we'll be pros - next
thing you know, Sauder will be offering us positions on faculty! In
spite of any anxiety, we're all very much looking forward to the
challenges and experiences of the next three weeks, and are very
confident that as a team, we'll do a terrific job, learn a ton, and
have an amazing time.

Wish us luck!

xo. The Social Entrepreneurship 101: Kenya Team.

Posted by Kevin Keystone