The role of Assist Social Capital and Challenges Group Ghana in Green Economy
The ‘green economy’ has an increasingly important role to play in the future of many countries, and Ghana is not different. This is why Assist Social Capital and Challenges’ role in providing financial management training for producers on the edge of Bia Bioshpere Reserve in Western Region is imperative. On 27th of March, 2018, Challenges’ Benjamin Res Esanti and Michael ‘Meeki’ Adu facilitated a full morning training on financial management and best business practices to beneficiaries in Kunkumso, Bia.
The training was very interactive and engaging and was attended by high profile personalities from the region, including the Queen Mother of Asuopiri – Nana Abena Attaah – and the former District Chief Executive (DCE) of Bia West District – Hon. Alexander Ofori.
[themify_box color=”grey”][themify_quote]Thank you very much Challenges Ghana and Assist Social Capital for organising this training, we will not only apply this in our Beekeeping business but also in our other endeavours especially our cocoa farming.
– Hon. Alexander Ofori (former DCE- Bia West District)[/themify_quote][/themify_box]
The project connected with beneficiaries of a previous project (Green Economy in Biosphere Reserves) within Bia Biosphere Reserve who produce four products – honey, mushrooms, snails and palm oil. Their production is designed to support economic livelihoods whilst protecting the UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. However, selling to bulk purchasers is difficult as they had not managed to establishe trade linkages or partnership agreements with institutions and individuals to market their products.
Through this 3 month project, Assist Social Capital (ASC) and Challenges have successfully connected the beekeepers to Bright Amoah Antwi (CEO of Ecocycle Ghana Limited) and Emmanuel (CEO of Firm Nut Limited), the snail farmers to Bantama market women and Golden Beam Hotel, the mushroom farmers to Mr. Asante Ohene (CEO of Tropical African Mushroom) and palm oil farmers to the market women of Kumasi Central Market. This achievement will not only ensure consistent and constant market for the beneficiaries but also increase the revenue generation of these farmer associations. Not forgetting the opportunity it gives them to expand their businesses by procuring more facilities and adopting modern mechanisms to enhance efficient production.
Business cases for all the four products have been developed. They encapsulate the pros and cons of the business side of all the products. This is excellent as the Associations have a fair idea about what sits for them if they put their house together and approach their endeavours with a purely business mind.
During the training, producers were also connected to OASIIS, an online platform dedicated to connecting social entrepreneurs with social investment, partners, and like-minded businesses, catalysing their contribution to more sustainable global society.
Assist Social Capital and Challenges Worldwide have demonstrated their commitment to progress towards the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in diverse ways by using social capital and business improvement services respectively to deal with complex challenges.
It’s a new year at Challenges Uganda and our Accelerator programme is in full swing!
Building on the hugely successful ‘ICS Entrepreneur’ programme, where we have supported over 150 Ugandan SMEs with a full consulting service of diagnostics, recommendations and implementation and over 150 Ugandan youth with consulting experience and employability skills, we started piloting a new approach to supporting Ugandan SMEs.
Our Accelerator is based on the longstanding Challenges belief that quick consulting and mentoring only begins to realise the potential of SMEs. This type of programme has recently been controversial due to some organisations offering little value for money, offering e.g. only 3 meetings per month, for 6 months only, where 2 people per business have to go to labs or group sessions. Enterprises are usually required to pay at least a $500 commitment fee, plus 2% of their equity and at least 1% of all revenue.
Instead, our Accelerator as first word is modelled on a long-term support approach, encompassing four phases and a variety of resources: Diagnostics (3 months), Hands on Consulting (3 months), Fortnightly check-ins and Direct Mentoring (3-Months), Consolidation of Growth Strategy (3-months), in addition to further mentoring until tailored Revenue and Profit KPI targets are achieved. This means our success is directly proportional to the enterprises’ growth.
Since November, four exceptional Junior Consultants, all from Uganda, four Senior Mentors and four Senior staff have begun the Diagnostics phase, analysing strengths and fundamental issues and devising a work-plan for the Consulting phase to address the latter. We have also facilitated a successful intra-business deal, which has demonstrated our significant impact in less than 3 months of inception!
Uganda Accelerator team members at work
Also, our Investment Partners Entrepreneurs 4 Entrepreneurs, a membership network of investors and private companies in Belgium, sent their Managing Director to meet our first Accelerator Cohort in December, and were delighted with the breadth and the quality of our enterprises. We look forward to further incorporating this relationship into our Accelerator model.
Action at Home is the final step of the ICS programme. It requires volunteers to complete an activity that will allow them to transfer the skills learned on placement and benefit their home community. Here’s an account of Sangha’s Action at Home where she transferred her enterprise skills to raising awareness of food poverty in the UK.
What was the action and where did it take place?
I volunteered for a charity called FoodCycle and helped organise a Family Activity day in collaboration with St Mary’s church in Sheffield. The day started with a social meal. I collected surplus food from local supermarkets in the early morning which I then delivered to the kitchen and helped cook, along with other volunteers, a delicious three-course meal for anyone in the community who was hungry or lonely (including families with children). I also helped put out signs for the event in the morning and welcomed guests throughout the day. There were activities such as crafts and games organised in the church grounds in the afternoon.
How may people attended?
11-20
Did your Challenges Worldwide ICS experience inspire this action?
Yes
Have you done something like this before?
No
What did you learn during this project?
I learnt about food poverty and how it’s within our capacity to resolve it if we don’t waste so much food as a society. I also learnt that poverty is a reality for many people in my community and a space like this makes a significant difference in their lives.
Have you any future plans related to this project?
I will continue to help out during the social meals and Family Activity Days that FoodCycle leads and organises in my community as I am passionate about tackling preventable waste and eradicating poverty. I will also take a leading role in helping the charity advertise their events and make them more accessible to local residents.
How was your action Youth Led?
I took the initiative as a young volunteer to collect food, help with cooking and serving a nutritious meal for a large crowd, clean up afterwards as well as spread the word about FoodCycle and their events through posting signs and flyers out in the community.
How did your action Make a Connection?
My project covered three of the Global Goals: No poverty, No hunger, and Good health. There is poverty in my community which leads to hunger. Since ‘junk’ food is generally cheaper than their nutritious counterparts, this is what poor people eat more of, leading to poor health. By providing a nutritious meal to people who couldn’t otherwise afford it made a huge difference to their lives. Being marginalised leads to poor mental health as well which we helped counteract by giving people a chance to socialise and engage in activities with other people in their community.
How did your action Make a Change?
There was an opportunity for visitors and volunteers to make a donation on the day. This helped raise funds for future social meals and activity days that will continue to benefit the community. All the volunteer cooks were unemployed – the day provided us all with vital employability skills and practice in cooking and hospitality, project management and team work. Furthermore, the FoodCycle programme has gained media attention during a recent nation-wide campaign on curbing food waste within big businesses in the supply chain (‘Stop the Rot’). Even if this individual event may not have directly impacted upon public policy, events such as this, across the UK, collectively have the power to influence policy-making and the food recovery process.
How did your action Engage Others?
The space and time we created gave the local community, especially the poor and the marginalised, a place to go, to belong, to have fun and get involved. In addition, I got the chance to speak to members of my cooking team about ICS, Challenges Worldwide and my recent experience to help spread awareness about this fantastic opportunity. After the event, I spoke to friends and family about my work and experience at FoodCycle which made them aware of food poverty and the opportunities they have to make a difference where
Ghanian tech startup TinyDavid has created an exciting location mapping service that is revolutionising the market for African enterprises. With the Support of Challenges Worldwide TinyDavid are on a path to change the world.
Why are Challenges Worldwide working with TinyDavid?
Charity and NGOs both in the continent and across the world are indispensable combatants in the war waged against poverty in Africa. Their humanitarian efforts in fighting off disease pandemics, providing shelter, potable water, and other important relief services have continually been hailed. While most of them are persistent at first in providing as much aid as possible to selected communities, they can only do so much and would have to channel their resources elsewhere.
Sustainabilty and Scalability
This lack of continuity always begs the question of how scalable and sustainable these projects are in the long term. This inconsistency defines the incentive for the alternative approach of other pioneering NGOs. Challenges Worldwide believes that by supporting the development of fair and inclusive local economies we can help alleviate poverty and bring a lasting positive impact to communities in low- and middle-income countries by empowering emerging businesses to make them more sustainable and successful. Through the International Citizen Service (ICS), a UK Government funded development programme that brings together young people from the UK and developing countries to volunteer in disadvantaged communities in Africa, Asia and Latin America, Challenges Worldwide volunteers work together with micro and small-sized enterprises where they can have a direct positive impact through sharing their capabilities, skills, perspectives and experiences.
Kailan and Jonathan (Volunteers) working in the TinyDavid office
Whats in it for the volunteers?
It’s an enviable opportunity to develop professional skills to enhance the employability of volunteers over the long term and create a global cadre of future wealth creators who have a practical understanding of the vital role of economic development in reducing poverty. Having already influenced dozens of small businesses in Ghana, the programme seeks to increase its impact to further parts of the country. TinyDavid is one of the enterprises being supported by Challenges Worldwide.
For a technology based enterprise, TinyDavid is a particularly peculiar name. However, the story behind the name brings the company’s mission to life. The business’s motto ‘tiny solutions to big problems’ is clever mantra from the famous bible story of the encounter between the giant Philistine warrior Goliath who was defeated by a tiny teenage boy, David. This creativity, illustrated in the brand, amongst other such ingenuous and unique ways of thinking is what has allowed the business to overcome any challenge thrown its way, and flourish in the process of becoming a game-changer in the Ghanaian tech industry.
So what is TinyDavid?
In Ghana, it is no mystery that finding your way around can be a bit of a hurdle, especially if you’re new to an area or in worst cases a visitor from a different continent. Although the average Ghanaian is irrepressibly hospitable and beaming with friendly smiles willing to give a helping hand to lost people in the neighbourhood, he is poor at giving directions. Unfortunately, our goodwill often gets such people who have gone astray even further confused. People cannot necessarily be blamed however since houses rarely have numbers, and street names are near enough invisible. The usual practice is that well known locations such as businesses or schools are used for navigational purposes but are rarely reliable in poorly zoned areas. This is where TinyDavid and more importantly their app, SnooCode comes to salvage this menace of directional errors.
SnooCode
The SnooCode app founded by Sesinam Dagadu in 2011 produces a unique specified code which uses a combination of any of the 26 letters from the English alphabet and numbers to accurately generate a code which will pinpoint your location using GPS technology. You are then enabled to use this code to identify the distance, time expected for distance to be travelled and plot routes to your very exact location without the usual stress of asking your way around town.
The prospects of such an amazing app coded to be user friendly to every layman is just limitless. This multipurpose usefulness of SnooCode has already been exhibited as a potential ally to not only the individual but to benefit broader society.
Why is SnooCode so revolutionary?
In an epidemic situation for example, the ability to produce an accurate location for local authorities to use allows them to act swiftly and efficiently, reducing the risk of several damages occurring. In different areas across the capital where up to 160 emergency workers have been trained to use the app, its social impact already in these early stages of development is phenomenal. An application like this has the possibility to do wonderful things.
How will it help the people and enteprises of Ghana day to day?
Mr Dagadu has reiterated that pertinent avenues like ambulance services and food delivery services have very low efficiency rates in Ghana as compared to that of other advanced countries largely due to the inability to produce an address and know where on earth to deliver to. While such efficient addressing systems are popular industries in places like the UK, and provide employment for many (particularly the youth) they are still fledgling in Ghana. The system has the potential to benefit young people greatly, as the addition of work experience in any form has the ability to bolster your CV remarkably and make you more employable.
The vision of TinyDavid is to export this ideology to Ghana which can provide jobs for a developing country where unemployment is rife, and essentially bridge the gap of uneasiness of finding directions in the country. It is quite apparent that Mr Dagadu is on the verge of revolutionising both transport, address systems and service delivery in Ghana. With the correct guidance, support, investment and marketing in place, SnooCode along with TinyDavid can balloon in size especially in a country which is as consumed with cellular technological advances as Ghana is.
Volunteer Analysis
During the 12-week programme in which Jon and Kailian (the assigned volunteers), from the UK and Ghana respectively, have both undertaken rigorous Chartered Management Institute (CMI) training as Junior Business Associates. The pair has added a fresh insight to TinyDavid’s operations and offer recommendations based on the Challenges Worldwide Enterprise Support Framework, paired with their cross cultural perspectives which has proven invaluable to the business over the past weeks.
They have conducted analysis involving the financial performance of the business, as well as using other tools to segment the market, and get to the root of the business’s hitches. All whilst gathering enough data to profile the business to be able to recommend suitable changes. As well as the analysis conducted, Jon and Kailan have gone the extra mile of getting involved in the day-day activities of the business while using their previous experiences and acquired training to make relevant decisions to positively influence the business such as developing potential features for the app.
Continued support from Challenges Worldwide
However, the programme doesn’t just end there. Challenges Marketplace, an online platform linking businesses across Africa to investors across the globe has the capability to help TinyDavid reach its peak potential. TinyDavid will be able to report monthly and build up a portfolio of themselves, which they can then use to attract investment. The more information uploaded on Marketplace allows for more investors to trust the business, understand it’s purpose and their track record to judge whether investment will be a worthwhile venture. Making funding accessible to these businesses is a key part of the programme in its mission to achieve the ultimate goal of alleviation of poverty in Africa through enterprise empowerment and strengthening business ties. While the attraction of funding is purposefully a keynote for Marketplace, it also enhances networking and creates specialised contacts in relevant fields all geared towards achieving TinyDavid’s business goals whilst meeting Challenges Worlwide’s wider social targets.
As Challenges Worldwide volunteers, Jon and Kalian have both gained massive experience with this opportunity to work on a project such as SnooCode especially in the early stages where their help, and guidance have had a substantial impact.
Their input into SnooCode has been invaluable for TinyDavid, but the Challenges Worldwide’s work does not, and will not stop with the end of the 3-month volunteer placements. With an in-country business portfolio team as part of Challenges, TinyDavid has access to all the support it needs, and with other relevant opportunities available, TinyDavid could quite possibly become one of Challenges Worldwide’s biggest success stories.
Why did you choose to apply to Challenges Worldwide for your Saltire placement? What was it about ICS and Challenges which appealed to you?
I was looking to gain business skills in a challenging environment, away from the standard office type job. I was looking for something more adventurous, where my actions may have a greater impact than in a standard internship.
When you applied, what did you hope to gain from a Challenges Worldwide placement?
I was looking to gain early stage business experience in growing an SME. I wanted to gain exposure into how to build business plans, keep accounts, market and sell a product/service at grassroots level.
I was seeking to be in an environment that fostered an entrepreneurial spirit working and living with individuals of different cultural backgrounds but with a shared interest for sustainable development of social enterprises.
How did you find the pre-departure process, eg fundraising, training, preparations, and the support you received from Challenges and ICS throughout the pre-departure stage?
The pre-departure process was fairly straight forward. Challenges were helpful with vaccinations and there was plenty of support for the fundraising aspects. There was definetly a strong community with the UK mentors before we departed, this started with the two day briefing with CWW in Edinburgh and continued through groups in social media.
Can you summarise your placement and how you found living and working in another country and culture? What business did you work in, what was the host experience like, how did you find working with a national counterpart, and what did you learn from these aspects of the programme?
My placement was with Green Heat Ltd (www.greenheatinternational.com) who are biofuel specialists implementing onsite solutions to convert human and agricultural waste into sustainable sources of energy. I acted as a business and engineering consultant, exploring enterprise avenues in developing biogas and briquette production.
Working and living in a foreign non-western culture was extremely exciting. I was motivated throughout the entirety of my programme, largely due to my personnel interest in the companies work and the openness of the company directors Gabriel Okello and Vianney Tumwesige.
Working with a national counterpart had it’s pros and cons. It was a great opportunity to be immersed into their a local community but there were differences in work ethic and academic backgrounds. These difficulties were mostly overcome after the first two weeks by dividing tasks up and setting realistic targets. We went on to become a successful little unit.
What was your highlight of your placement?
1) Researching an alternative agro-waste kilning technique and developing a business proposal that would be pitched to the carbon Bureau of Uganda for a carbon trading scheme involving 8 of the largest flower farms in and around Kampala.
2) Visiting the final school a government funded initiative with Green Heat to install 10 fixed dome biogas latrine digesters. Please see the Seed Development Award video below:
What was your biggest challenge during your placement? How did you overcome this and what did you learn from this?
My biggest challenge at the early stages of the placement was ensuring a consistent communication link between myself, my counterpart Rachael and the company directors. I could see from other members on the programme they were completing excellent business/marketing/sales plans but were struggling with their host company to get the key messages across and implement such plans.
I dealt with any potential communication gaps by organising a weekly meeting with my counterpart and company directors every Friday afternoon to do the following:
We would collectively work on action plans for the following week and evaluate the work completed of the week just passed. Here we could schedule events, actions, activates and communication links and update on a shared doc. Expamples are shown bellow: https://issuu.com/alistairgordon/docs/a.gordon_weekly_action_plans
Bring everyone together to present:
Research findings (e.g mostly engineering streamlining of production)
To keep the meetings exciting and motivating we changed the venue most weeks and one of us organised a social event afterwards. Venues and activities included:
Macare University – with tour of research facilities
The garden of my homestay with meal and pool tournament afterwards
Kampala’s Rugby clubs – lively pork barbeques!
Shearaton Hotel – swimming pool
Chinease resturants – (Gabriel loved Chinese food from studying in Beijing)
These meeting and events created strong ties and were key to my continued working relationship with Green Heat upon returning to the UK.
Now that you’ve had time to reflect on your placement, what impact has it had on you and your personal development? Did the placement have an impact or benefit for your business, counterpart and /or host community?
A massive impact no doubt. Personally I gained the experience/confidence to start a business (Riverbank- see below). My counterpart, Rachael gained the marketing experience she was seeking. My host company have grown extensively now employing 40 members of staff full-time and winning numerous contracts including the following:
An extra 10 government funded latrine biogas digesters which have now been installed in Ugandan schools
Since graduating, I co-founded Riverbank, a creative communications business to improve the outreach of Engineering and Ecology based projects. Our first business proposal was presented by the CEO of Green Heat at the prize giving ceremony for the seed development award in Nairobi, Kenya. Riverbank have been working with Green Heat ever since to enhance the information outreach of their products and services.
Our site is not quite live but a a little more information can be found here:
http://jamienayar.github.io/
When is does go live it shall be here:
www.riverbank-design.co.uk
LST Industries, leading tissue manufacturer in all of Southern Africa! Hmm not quite. Maybe someday. At the moment however, LST Industries is just a small enterprise running out of the same lot as the owner’s (Mrs Sibanda) other business, Norwich Insurance Brokers, and supplies tissues to just the small nearby area of Lusaka. Obviously it’s a long way to go from there to become even Lusaka’s main tissue manufacturer, but if the Zambian’s I have worked and lived alongside have taught me anything, it’s the ability to dream big.
Our first day was a lot to take in, and maybe somewhat overwhelming. Chapa, my Zambian counterpart, and I introduced ourselves to Mrs Sibanda, and talked to her about what we hoped to achieve, and what she wanted out of us. Although I didn’t really think about it as such at the time, this was our first taste of being consultants, and the first stage of our “Client Relationship”, which we would go on to learn about in our weekly CMI courses.
There were some difficulties or complications, it must be said – although she knew what we were there for, she also thought we would help on the factory floor, actually producing the tissues. Ah, this will be the managing expectations part of consultancy that had been mentioned. We politely conveyed that while we would of course be happy to help out in all areas of the business, she should understand that our role shouldn’t be as extra workers for a few months. After all, the long term benefit of that would be minimal, and when we departed, the business would go back to being the same as before. She seemed to understand, and agree, although she did proceed to provide us with steel toe-capped boots and coats for when we were working on the floor… one step at a time, I suppose. In fact that’s another thing I have learnt – progress is going to take a lot longer than you think, so celebrate the little victories.
In our first couple of weeks, we spent our time talking to the staff and trying to get started on the work, looking for ways we could help improve the company. We had lots of ideas; we saw how their record keeping could be made better and also their sales procedure. I spent the first week looking at a lot of financial data, which, I cannot lie, took me a long time to interpret. After some time though, although it felt like we had gathered loads of information, we still needed to do something with it, and make it presentable. It was here a part of the CMI course sprung to mind, about actually doing stuff with your data – it’s no use having a lot of data if it doesn’t mean anything, and I think this was a mistake we made in our first few weeks. Slightly unsure of how to have the best positive impact, we used somewhat of a scattergun approach, hoping to find something that would stick. We thought about it some more, and I used our observations of production to work produce a report on how effective the machines were and, happily, found that we could show were certain inefficiencies in the production process. From now on we would try to be more focused on our goals, and not get overwhelmed in trying to do too much.
Another thing we failed to do early on was organise meetings with our boss. We were in a new company; I personally was in an entirely new continent, so perhaps we were a little too timid. However, we have learnt, through our own experience and also as part of the course, how important it is to have a strong relationship with your boss/client, in order to ensure we are actually helping her in a way that she agrees with. Initially for example, I came up with a way that we could improve production, by possibly changing the specifications of the final product. It seemed perfect to me, the product itself would be barely altered, and they could increase production by about 5-10% with barely any effort. I got a little carried away with this, and ran through quite a lot of calculations about how much this could save. However, it was not until later that I presented this idea to Mrs Sibanda. Although she was impressed, she said it was basically not possible due to restrictions on the machine and customer requirements. This was obviously disappointing, but if I had mentioned this to her earlier I could have spent my time on something more useful.
From then on we strived to meet more frequently with Mrs Sibanda, in order to ensure a productive time here. As it was, she was much more concerned about worker idleness and safety than the ins and outs of production. With this knowledge, we were able to produce a schedule and set of rules to ensure the workers were always busy, and we got some basic safety signs made to ensure the customers and the workers were safer. This took little time, but Mrs Sibanda was very pleased with the results; we had been focussed on ways we could have hopefully a bigger impact, and these signs and schedules felt small, but like I said, one step at a time.
As it is, a 10 week consultancy is obviously a very short amount of time to significantly improve a business such as ours, and to be frank, I’m not sure if LST will be the Hungry Lion* of tissue manufacturing by the time we leave. However learning about consultancy through both direct experience and as part of the CMI, I see now how we can help the company, even by doing seemingly small things, it is all part of giving the company foundations on which to grow in the future.
*The McDonalds of Zambia fast food, they are everywhere. I’m actually sat in one now, as I type this.”
To see some Changemaker stories from the last two years please visit our Blog
Before embarking on my International Citizen Service Entrepreneurship placement in Lusaka, Zambia, I had little knowledge of sustainable business, and even less knowledge of its potential to complexly contribute to development. I certainly did not expect that the enhancement of said knowledge would come from consulting a business in the hospitality industry. However, the ripple effect of changes in business operations is eye-opening in developing industry sectors such as tourism and hospitality in Zambia, and it is in this sector that business efficiency, effectiveness and sustainability will help not only the company in question, but also its surrounding community and associated supply chain.
My placement, Lui Guest House, is a small, family-owned lodge in the heart of Lusaka, drawing in local and international clients alike to provide quality and affordable accommodation. Alongside accommodation, it supplies restaurant services and outside hire of certain parts of the guest house. At the other end of the spectrum, it is a consumer of products and services to support its operations – some established supply chains, such as electrical power, and some variable, such as food ingredients and cleaning products, subject to budgets and availability. It was the role of the business as a consumer which brought about some of the most long-term changes implemented during our placement; we used the consumer position of Lui Guest House to create a unique selling point for the business and the services it provides: environmental responsibility (or, as some might call it, eco-friendliness).
Picture this: a buzzing urban tourism industry in the capital, dominated by expensive hotel chains and backpacker hostels. State-of-the-art facilities and services provide for the corporate traveller, while affordable prices and friendly hostel environments provide for the exploring volon-tourist. At the middle of this range, you have guest houses – reliable, affordable, sensibly located accommodations, with quietly sufficient services such as WiFi, simple and hearty restaurant menus, hand-washed laundry and breezy back gardens. They cannot afford to invest in oak-panelled conference facilities, nor gourmet restaurant meals. How can they appear as unique in the face of their competition? Our starter-for-10 solution for Lui Guest House combined a unique selling point with a real challenge faced by all Zambians these days: lack of electricity.
Zesco, the state-owned electrical generation company which holds a quasi-monopoly of power provision services, has been battling with low rainfall levels over recent years, leading to a lack of hydro-electric power generation and hence scheduled power cuts amounting up to 12 hours per day. Obviously, this is a huge challenge for a business whose customer relations rely on phones and internet, and whose customer satisfaction relies on the provision of lighting, TV facilities and running water via a powered borehole. By addressing this challenge, not only does the guest house gain a competitive advantage in its market segment, but also a unique selling point, in line with recommendations of the Zambia Tourism policy to promote environmentally sound operations in the tourism industry, as well as the development of eco-tourism.
Conversations with the business owners of the guest house led to a trial being implemented in what will hopefully be a long-term conversion to off-grid solar power. A solar panel has been installed, providing lighting and power for the communal TV in the main building of the accommodation, with plans being made for additional panels to be installed in the main administrative area and the borehole, to ensure consistent provision of electricity and maintain the environmental responsibility of the business. By carrying out these changes, the business becomes part of a new, more responsible supply chain – that of alternative energy, an industry which is rising rapidly in Zambia and has enormous development potential, not least for rural areas such as the Southern Province’s Chikanta Chiefdom, where the provision of solar power has greatly enhanced the performance of educational and healthcare facilities. In this sense, the alignment of Lui Guest House with this new supply chain creates exactly the ripple effect described above – the injection of trade dynamics and income into a responsible and necessary industry; the consumer choice leading to sustainable development.
An increase in business efficiency, effectiveness and sustainability, through a move towards alternative energy use, is coupled with a positive community impact, through the raising of awareness of solar power, as well as a robust contribution to a responsible supply chain. The added benefits of eliminating the challenge of Zesco’s unreliable power supply and improving customer relations are proof that business sustainability generates profit through increased effectiveness, and contributes to the responsible development of the tourism industry, one of Zambia’s most promising economic sectors, but also the most vulnerable to unsustainable development.
To see some Changemaker stories from the last two years please visit our Blog
Business cases for all the four products have been developed. They encapsulate the pros and cons of the business side of all the products. This is excellent as the Associations have a fair idea about what sits for them if they put their house together and approach their endeavours with a purely business mind.
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