In teaching our business plan course, one of the lessons we try to instill over and over is: what is the uniqueness of the product or service you will offer? Inevitably, the answer is "low price." Though we try to explain over and over that low price in the Kenyan environment (particularly in the slums) is not an effective strategy, the lesson falls on deaf ears. Somehow it’s hard to convince our students that a “low price” strategy is most likely to lead to price wars, as everyone will follow suit.
A story in last week's Daily Standard (a local Kenyan newspaper) reminded me of the futility of continuously focusing on being the lowest price provider. Cellphone penetration in Kenya is currently at 63%, and it’s estimated by Business Monitor International that penetration will be at 100% by 2013. There are four major cell providers in Kenya: Safaricom has 70% of the market share; Airtel has 15.2%; Telkom Kenya (also known as Orange) has 8.5% and Yu has 6.4% (all of these numbers were as of end of December 2010).
Text messaging is big in Kenya--it's rare to find someone, even from the slums, who does not have a cellphone. Most cell services are “prepay” where the customer buys an amount of credit (generally between 100 KES (Kenyan Shillings) and 500 KES at a time), and then draws down that credit with usage. In order to compete and grow their customer bases, some cell companies in 2009 and 2010 introduced an even smaller "prepay" credit in the amount of 20 KES. This made cell usage affordable for people who had very little money, allowing credit for a couple of text messages and/or brief phone calls to be purchased at a time. This was a way of increasing the customer base for cell providers by tapping into a whole new category of users (those who are very poor).
Monday, August 8, 2011
Sunday, August 7, 2011
The first week … meet the Kibera students
When I enter the classroom for the first time, there is always so much expectation and excitement. How many students are going to show up? What will be the dynamics in the class? Are they going to be lively? Will they show up the next day (if they do not, I cannot help myself but wonder whether we have done a good job)?
But then a week passes by and I suddenly find myself attached to all of my students. I know their names and nicknames; I know that they are all extremely smart and courageous to be willing to start their own business at such a young age (student age range is 18 – 25). I know who is the class comedian (Edwin), who is the mathematician (Dennis – he also runs his own business already) and who is the cool DJ kid (Mich). I watch the girls in the class: Sellah, Gertrude, Catherine and Eunice argue their point with the boys and firmly stand their ground. There is also more serious David and Aloys, a very boyish looking Nazri (his real name is Stephen and he wants to be a stand-up comedian), quieter Michael and Felix. And I can not forget Augustine and Josphat who always manage to surprise me with their bright insights and comments.There are some things that will never change. Their unconditional love for sweets and games. The creative excuses why they did not do their homework. The dancing and lively chatter during the tea break. And their wide smiles. But what I love the most about being in class is, that it is not only about teaching.
It is also about getting to know my students. Last Friday I learnt so much about their active community. Number of them are members and volunteers with the Foundation of Hope (the Foundation operates from the site where we teach). They write their own poetry and plays and then choreograph them. They dance and act and have an all day festival next week and I cannot wait to see them perform. If what they can do in the class is just a taste of it, it should be a world class show.
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Education apparently is not enough
Yesterday was our first day of teaching. We have two sites, one in Kibera (which has often been referred to as the largest slum in East Africa, though apparently more recently, they’ve estimated that its size is perhaps one-third of earlier claims. It’s hard to do a census in a slum.) We’ve worked in Kibera before and we understand its rhythms, to the extent that a mizunga (white person) can do so.
Our second site is in a different slum at a different edge of Nairobi. This slum is called Mathare. Mathare may have recently overtaken Kibera in terms of size, from what I’ve been told. I accompanied the two UBC team members (both MBA students) who are working at Mathare so that I could get a sense of the conditions first hand, with class in session. It was interesting, and disheartening, at once. But it might also give a sense, for those of you who have made donations to the programs, of how money can be spent in these types of programs.
Our program provides three weeks of free education, with all the mentoring a student could want, all for the asking. We have sometimes been criticized for not charging a nominal fee for the program (say around $10-15), to add a level of seriousness and commitment to the program. We have resisted that suggestion to date.
Our program generally runs from 8:30-2:30, give or take. One of the first issues that arose at the Mathare site was “what language would be we using?” We had greeted each student as they arrived, watched as they kicked a soccer ball around, and played some ice-breaker games outside. Everything was comfortably communicated in English. We’ve always taught in English (Kenya, like Canada, is a “two official language country” with Kenya’s two languages being Kiswahili and English). This has never been an issue in the five previous years that we have been here.
In Mathare, it became an issue. There was a class ringleader who was clearly trying to stir everyone up. To what end, it was not clear, but it made for a rocky start. At first I thought perhaps his English was weaker than he’d like. Later, though, I was given an alternative hypothesis by one of our drivers. He noted that in Mathare, unlike in Kibera, there is far more peer pressure. Part of that peer pressure means that speaking in English is not appropriate (even if you can do so fluently, which, it turned out, most of the class can, so they must be practicing somewhere). If you are speaking in English (as a resident of Mathare) it means that you are showing off, and trying to let everyone know that you are better than everyone else.
Next question: how much were they going to be paid for taking our free three-week class? We told them “nothing,” but this did not set well. (We simply have never been able to raise enough money to consider this as a possibility.) We explained that we are here to teach, we are educators, not bankers or financers, and that education was what we provided. Not a stellar answer from their perspective, to be sure. Many NGOs do pay people here to go to training sessions. I think that is a bad model overall. Because then the focus is on showing up to get paid, not on learning. If people really don’t want the education, but bribery gets them into the classroom, is that really a good thing? I have yet to see a student learn when they didn’t want to learn, and I have a lot of experience in the classroom.
Next question: were we feeding them lunch? No. (Again, our fundraising simply does not support that kind of activity.) Without lunch, some said they didn’t want to stay beyond 12:30, even though for many of them there was nowhere else to go (unemployment among youth is a staggering 60%). In fact, with no lunch, they suggested that we just run a two-hour class, but they wanted the certificates that came with the program, even if they were only doing 20% of the work. We didn’t go for that either.
Next question: If they didn’t drink the tea and eat the mendazis (similar to donuts) we provided (something our fundraising does provide for, and for which we’re grateful to our donors), could they be given the equivalent in money instead? One student in particular had an issue with this because he’s Muslim, and yesterday was the start of Ramadan, the month of fasting (and fasting goes from sun-up to sun-down, which is why he couldn’t partake of our tea break). This would be about the equivalent of me going to your house for dinner, and after dinner you offered me dessert, and I wasn’t hungry, so I asked you if you could pay me, instead, the amount of money my dessert cost you to provide. We said we didn’t give “rebates.
It will be interesting to see how this site develops, who stays, and who goes. Particularly the ringleader.
The photos help illustrate the Mathare scene. The first is an aerial view of a section of Mathare (note the tin roofs, and tin buildings). The second is a view from our classroom door, looking out (soccer/football is big here, and we brought a soccer ball for recreational breaks). Finally, here is Julie, working with her breakout group.
Our second site is in a different slum at a different edge of Nairobi. This slum is called Mathare. Mathare may have recently overtaken Kibera in terms of size, from what I’ve been told. I accompanied the two UBC team members (both MBA students) who are working at Mathare so that I could get a sense of the conditions first hand, with class in session. It was interesting, and disheartening, at once. But it might also give a sense, for those of you who have made donations to the programs, of how money can be spent in these types of programs.Our program provides three weeks of free education, with all the mentoring a student could want, all for the asking. We have sometimes been criticized for not charging a nominal fee for the program (say around $10-15), to add a level of seriousness and commitment to the program. We have resisted that suggestion to date.
Our program generally runs from 8:30-2:30, give or take. One of the first issues that arose at the Mathare site was “what language would be we using?” We had greeted each student as they arrived, watched as they kicked a soccer ball around, and played some ice-breaker games outside. Everything was comfortably communicated in English. We’ve always taught in English (Kenya, like Canada, is a “two official language country” with Kenya’s two languages being Kiswahili and English). This has never been an issue in the five previous years that we have been here.In Mathare, it became an issue. There was a class ringleader who was clearly trying to stir everyone up. To what end, it was not clear, but it made for a rocky start. At first I thought perhaps his English was weaker than he’d like. Later, though, I was given an alternative hypothesis by one of our drivers. He noted that in Mathare, unlike in Kibera, there is far more peer pressure. Part of that peer pressure means that speaking in English is not appropriate (even if you can do so fluently, which, it turned out, most of the class can, so they must be practicing somewhere). If you are speaking in English (as a resident of Mathare) it means that you are showing off, and trying to let everyone know that you are better than everyone else.
Next question: how much were they going to be paid for taking our free three-week class? We told them “nothing,” but this did not set well. (We simply have never been able to raise enough money to consider this as a possibility.) We explained that we are here to teach, we are educators, not bankers or financers, and that education was what we provided. Not a stellar answer from their perspective, to be sure. Many NGOs do pay people here to go to training sessions. I think that is a bad model overall. Because then the focus is on showing up to get paid, not on learning. If people really don’t want the education, but bribery gets them into the classroom, is that really a good thing? I have yet to see a student learn when they didn’t want to learn, and I have a lot of experience in the classroom.
Next question: were we feeding them lunch? No. (Again, our fundraising simply does not support that kind of activity.) Without lunch, some said they didn’t want to stay beyond 12:30, even though for many of them there was nowhere else to go (unemployment among youth is a staggering 60%). In fact, with no lunch, they suggested that we just run a two-hour class, but they wanted the certificates that came with the program, even if they were only doing 20% of the work. We didn’t go for that either.
Next question: If they didn’t drink the tea and eat the mendazis (similar to donuts) we provided (something our fundraising does provide for, and for which we’re grateful to our donors), could they be given the equivalent in money instead? One student in particular had an issue with this because he’s Muslim, and yesterday was the start of Ramadan, the month of fasting (and fasting goes from sun-up to sun-down, which is why he couldn’t partake of our tea break). This would be about the equivalent of me going to your house for dinner, and after dinner you offered me dessert, and I wasn’t hungry, so I asked you if you could pay me, instead, the amount of money my dessert cost you to provide. We said we didn’t give “rebates.
It will be interesting to see how this site develops, who stays, and who goes. Particularly the ringleader.
The photos help illustrate the Mathare scene. The first is an aerial view of a section of Mathare (note the tin roofs, and tin buildings). The second is a view from our classroom door, looking out (soccer/football is big here, and we brought a soccer ball for recreational breaks). Finally, here is Julie, working with her breakout group.
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