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.

How Web 2.0 Keeps Us in the Know

In a previous post we discussed how SE101 uses Web 2.0 (and most specifically Social Media) to drive awareness, engage our network and grow our community. In this post, we briefly want to let you know about one of the ways we use Web 2.0 and Social Media to keep us at the leading edge of information on Social Entrepreneurship and grow our network among the leading SE people and organizations.

Most people will be familiar with facebook (check out our page!) and how that works as a social device, i.e. you add your network, they add you and then you share your posts, pictures, movies, updates and etc. with you network getting general updates on their 'news feed' (whenever you do something) and specific updates in their notifications (whenever you do something that mentions/involves them). What this requires is the voluntary connection (your network) in the facebook ecosystem.

Twitter (please check us out here as well!) on the other hand allows you to 'follow' and be 'followed' in an effort to create and engage your network - think of twitter networking just like a cocktail party, everyone is there, and you can eavesdrop on public conversations, or you can engage and have conversation with people you want to network with. In twitter, like facebook, you can still post links and pictures etc. but twitter is much less of a 'restricted' social platform or self-selecting social network than facebook. The contrast can be boiled down to the difference between a social club and a community centre - facebook is built more exclusive, you need to be a member and people need to let you in their club.

What's beautiful about twitter (similar to the facebook news feed) is that in this ecosystem, not only are publicly posted tweets there for you to browse (following or not), but many tweeps add a "hashtag" to their posts so that other tweeps can follow a topic or trend.

All of the latest information (including links to images, video, articles and etc.) that tweeps post can be aggregated and searched by these hashtags and trends nicely for review - without having to dig into twitter, searching and following. For us here at SE101, this means we can follow the hashtag #SocEnt (Social Entrepreneurship) for example and see everyone posting with the hashtag (we also really like #NonProfit and #WEP - World Economic Forum).

Through the magic of Web 2.0 (if you really want to know how it works watch this video), innovative coding allows us to take these hashtags and trends to an all new level and a daily 'newspaper' can be created to give us the previous days most notable tweets. Paper.li has launched a service that allows you to create your own special interest newspaper, or, like us, allows you to follow topics and trends that are important to you in a nice, easy to read package instead of a mess of linear, historically listed 140 character posts.

Here are a couple papers we like:

1. #SocEnt http://paper.li/tag/socent
2. #WEF http://paper.li/davos
3. #NonProfit http://paper.li/tag/nonprofit

While these newspapers are informative (and they are!) they still do not replace live participation in the ecosystems that are the Social Media Cocktail Party. Please, check us out on Facebook and Twitter - like us, follow us, share our posts, retweet our tweets - with your help, we can continue to grow our community and provide our course to Kenyan Youth!

International seeds versus Kenyan 'ownership': How best to manage the chicken and the egg?

Happy New Year!

In our recent meeting with the Aga Khan Foundation, a question was raised about the effectiveness of external organizations planting seeds for change in Africa without domestic 'ownership' (read: financial endowment and input into operations) of the initiative.

SE101 has taken the approach to initiate our project on a grassroots level, providing the structure, allowing for our students to take ownership of their business learning and planning and to create a network amongst our past participants as our program grows along their business needs. We are primarily funded by independent North American philanthropy and have not made the choice to secure domestic Kenyan sponsorship yet.

While the argument for domestic vested interest is valid and important to long term success, the issue is more over the foundation and gestation of the initiative. Which comes first and which will result in the most durable and successful initiative? Is it more important that the participants feel ownership or sponsors? Should it be built with integrative channels for domestic sponsors to 'make it their own' along the way or should you be working to involve these domestic players from the outset?

Your insight, reference to relevant sources on the topic and opinions would be appreciated! Please feel free to reply with a comment here, on our facebook page, or on twitter @SE101Africa.

Web2.0 and SE101: Is there anybody out there?

After completing the SE101 project on the ground in Kenya, I packed my bags to go on exchange at the Copenhagen Business School (CBS) and finish my Sauder MBA requirements abroad. I felt like this was a great opportunity to further expand on my International Business acumen and broaden my experience as a whole. I planned on taking a few courses in Social Entrepreneurship (SE) and Sustainability at CBS and the timing coming from Kenya to the classroom could not have been better. The CBS SE course offered a dynamic look at how Web2.0 (Social Media and User-driven content platforms like facebook, twitter etc.) is being used by Social Entrepreneurs to generate not only interest and support, but also Social Innovation.

Reflecting on what organizations like MYC4, and Kiva are doing with Web2.0, I started to see a need to integrate more social media into the SE101 strategy. While MYC4 and Kiva allow users to actively engage in (near) direct lending to those in need, this has a limited impact on capacity building. Their model is effective for generating funds because of the nature of their social media use - providing those-in-need place to connect with those-with-funds and vice-versa. Nevertheless, their overall use of Web2.0 is rather static, providing a means for information dissemination not idea generation or knowledge transfer. Since SE101 is not a financier (at this point), this model connecting 'investors' directly with our students is not useful. However, in our effort to build capacity on the ground, we do need to raise funds to deliver our program - in effect we need to be connected to donors and sponsors in the same way these other platforms connect those-in-need to those-with-funds. The difference between our models creates a question of impact: Will an exchange of funds alone successfully grow the recipient's business and drive durability or would on capacity building be a more effective stabilizer in the long term?

I'm not sure anyone has the answer to this question. What I can say is, after spending time in Kenya on SE101 and looking into the primarily negative return on investment (ROI) for the social media based funding platforms, I feel capacity building is the better way to equip those in need. By teaching our students the business skills needed to actively research, estimate, project, and plan their ventures, we are creating real value and equipping them with the skills that not only benefit the actual entrepreneurs of our class, but challenging those that are not the entrepreneurial type. Moreover, while in the classroom, we are creating a diverse and dynamic network of individuals with ideas and drive and connecting them to their future employees, service providers and customers - real social networking.

I believe there can be a better use of Web2.0 resources from existing organizations. What might this look like? Well, Kirby, an SE101 Project Coordinator and Content Strategist for the Business Objects Community on the SAP Community Network, has been developing an online community for our students and student teachers to collaborate and communicate in a similar way to Facebook. This means SE101 can offer our students online post-program support and real time access to Sauder business school students and their knowledge. This is capacity building and what I see as the future benefit of Web2.0 in social development.

Social Media in many ways rests on the laurels of Crowdsourcing, essentially outsourcing tasks to a community and leveraging mass collaboration to reach an ideal result - think monkeys typing on typewriters. While SE101 is developing the typewriter to integrate its Kenyan and UBC students, we also need to inform the public about what we are doing (static) and engage our potential donor networks (dynamic) to help fund our efforts. This is where SE101's integrated use of blogging, Facebook, and Twitter come in. We hope that by using social media we can enhance our venture, engage our stakeholders and generate more significant donations. Only time will tell if using these channels will be more or less effective than traditional fund raising efforts. Ideally, if we could exceed our annual 'project' need and start generating greater income from donors, this would ultimately provide us with a greater ability to create long term ROI in the form of successful, sustainable development in Kenya. Until then, we hope we can at least use these channels to further document and legitimize our existing successful efforts and future goals.

Please feel free to engage SE101 through any of our available Web2.0 channels (blogging, Facebook, and Twitter) or by email, telephone, telegraph, snail mail or carrier pigeon. The point being, we want you to engage us, we have a lot of incredible stories to share with you and we want to show you how your support will make a lasting difference.