kampala

7 Nov 2017 Blog, Professional Development, Skills, volunteers business, Chartered Management Institute, CMI, International citizen service, kampala, professional development, skills, SME, training, uganda 2

Supporting Ugandan Businesses

Challenges Admin

Mary Nayiga, 26, from Mukono Nabuti did her Bachelor in Development Studies. Before her Challenges Worldwide ICS placement, supporting Ugandan businesses, she was unemployed. “I had worked on some contracts but I had no previous experience of volunteering. I wanted to discover what it’s like to volunteer and to work alongside volunteers from the UK,” she shared.

During her placement, she worked with Mashambani Dairy Goats Farm, an enterprise that has been producing milk and yoghurt with locally sourced goats since 2016. Mary, together with her counterpart, did an evaluation of the organisation and made, as well as implemented, recommendations.

“The business needed support with organisational structure. The CEO does everything so she needed support to look at operations management. As a new business, marketing was a big focus of our consultation intervention,” Mary said.

She said that many people have never heard about goat milk or they do not know about their benefits. That is why part of her job was to talk with an identified targeted market and raise awareness about the product.

Mary shared with us that she “created awareness by visiting children’s homes which is one of the identified target markets. I personally visited 6 homes. I developed sales skills and followed-up with potential customers. Part of my work was to provide educational interventions to help them understand the benefits. The work I did around marketing, helped to raise awareness of the product.”

“My proudest moment during my placement was my first presentation. At first, I was very scared and I was feeling nervous as I have watched the previous volunteers deliver their presentations with confidence. However, I delivered my presentation to the business development team and I received positive feedback and comments. This was really encouraging and has helped improve my confidence in future public speaking opportunities,” Mary said.

Finally, Mary commented that the Challenges Worldwide ICS placement was a “great opportunity to discover individual strengths and weaknesses.” She also said that “the placement has changed me so much. It has widened my knowledge of the business world. I now know how to start up a business and how they are managed. As a result of my Challenges Worldwide ICS placement, I’m thinking of starting my own business with packed fruits. I feel more employable and feel I could develop my own business.”

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26 Apr 2017 enterprise, Environment, Impact, News crops, Earth Day, food, kampala, pollution, renewable energy, uganda, waste disposal 1

Earth Day 2017: Areg Agro Foods – delicious mozzarella which doesn’t hurt the planet.

Challenges Admin

April 22^nd, 1970 marked the first celebration of Earth Day. With its roots in New York, at a time when pollution was considered a by-product of prosperity, Earth Day saw the birth of the modern environmental movement. Groups opposing pesticides, destruction of the environment, oil spills, raw sewage and power plants all came together and realised their common values; environmental protection. The result was coast to coast protests; 20 million Americans came out into the streets in favour of environmental reform. Since its dawn almost 40 years ago, Earth Day has become the world’s largest civic holiday, spreading to 193 countries and putting the issue of environmental protection into the minds of millions across the world.

Whilst on my Challenges Worldwide placement, I am working as a business support associate with Areg Agro Foods, a small food producer located in Kampala. The owner and CEO, Rachael Corda, has a background in organic farming and is passionate about incorporating environmental considerations into the day to day workings of her business. Rachael knows the value of using organic techniques to grow crops. The result is high-quality natural foods which do not cause any of the environmental problems of pesticides, for example, soil contamination and the death of wildlife.

Since the birth of her business, Rachael has taught farmers how to grow their crops organically and has converted many farmers to the organic lifestyle. Areg Agro only uses high-quality organic crops and milk to produce their many varieties of Italian cheese and fruit preserves.

However, Rachael is also careful about the environmental impact of her business’s waste products. This has led her to reduce waste by ensuring that by-products of cheese production are sold at a rock-bottom price to local farmers and used as animal feed or fertilisers. The result: delicious mozzarella which doesn’t hurt the planet.

In 2016 the WHO published a report which stated that air pollution levels in Kampala and Jinja were 5.3x higher than recommended safe levels. The burning of rubbish was stated as a significant contributing factor to this figure. Luckily, another business that volunteers on our cycle are working with, Bio-electricity has the answer. Established in 2008 in Kyengera by Wilson Ssendagaya, Bio-electricity has an innovative approach to waste disposal. Waste is sorted through and split into categories; natural waste such as food products are turned into an organic fertiliser over a process of two months. This reduces air pollution and also ensures that waste serves another purpose. Ssendagaya also has big plans for the future, currently, plastic waste is shredded and stored with the intention to convert it into diesel using technology imported from the United States. This would not just solve the issue of waste disposal but would go some way into the move towards renewable energies, not just in Uganda but globally.

Written by Alexander O’Riordan from team Kampala

8 Dec 2016 News commitment, community, development, kampala, market, social enterprise, uganda 0

Social Enterprise: Put your money where your mouth is

Challenges Admin

Challenges Worldwide believe that social enterprise is the most effective vehicle for poverty alleviation in developing nations. This is a complex and difficult argument to make, but yesterday our guest speaker Martin Muganzi made it thoroughly convincingly by recounting his experiences of working in development.

Martin started from humble beginnings, raised with 6 siblings by a single mother, often relying on neighbors for support. For Martin, community support has been vital to his way of life from an early age, and he quickly became involved in giving back to the community through work with the missionaries at his secondary school. This continued throughout his university education in biomedical science, as part of the scholarship programme through which he had enrolled.

A Passion for community work

After a brief career as a lecturer, Martin realised that community work was his passion, and decided to pursue it full-time. Martin’s first foray into full-time community work was through the Youth at Work Initiative. This project relied upon funding to reduce youth unemployment by skills training, mentoring and job creation.

While YAWI was a great success, reaching over 1000 young people, Martin was somewhat disillusioned by his experience working with foreign NGOs. It seemed that the availability of funding could change quickly, dependent on the current development priorities. What this meant in practice was a lack of commitment to real change, which has to be followed up and supported in the long term. Martin had similarly questioned the approach of NGOs while trying to educate people on the dangers of HIV/aids. He cites events which rely on “per diem” handouts as particularly ineffective. While it is a great way to encourage participation, when your mind is on the food which you came to eat, it is difficult to focus on the bigger picture.

Commitment issues

What Martin has realised through these experiences is the importance of true commitment. A team’s commitment to a cause is far more important than their qualifications or resources. And how is commitment commonly displayed? Money. Martin has taken this vital observation and applied it to community work. The result is social enterprise or “social entrepreneurship.”

The mentoring scheme at YAWI had been plagued by the problem of lack of commitment. Mentors would sign up with enthusiasm and promises and then fail to show up in the longer term. Martin now uses a fee-based model where both mentors and mentees pay, thus demonstrating their commitment. The resulting enterprise, All Stars Mentoring Academy(link) is a testament to the success of this approach, with 30 mentees successfully completing the comprehensive 3-month programme this year.

Look at the market

Martin’s approach to social entrepreneurship is deceptively simple:

Identify a community with a shared problem
Look at the markets they are participating in and identify exactly where the market is failing that community.
Two great examples of where Martin has done this are his businesses Essential Home Services and the Calabash Collection.

Both examples are illustrative of the power of social enterprise. The Calabash Collection sell beautiful bags and accessories made from recycled marketing materials. This came about simply through Martin’s personal investigations in the Katwe Slum. He asked how much the workers were paid to make bags, and then followed the supply chain to see how much they were sold for. He thought that a 1000% markup was extractive and simply went into competition, providing a much fairer cut to the workers.

Essential Home Services is a similarly simple model. Martin was aware of a large influx of young workers into Kampala, unemployed and eager to find work. Essential Home Services provides a platform to link domestic helpers to homes who need them. They provide security and background checks for a delayed payment and take a small cut of workers earnings.

Both of these businesses provide a fantastic service to consumers. However, of more interest to us in the creation of decent work, in contrast to the exploitative alternatives. As Martin argued, the power of decent pay and new opportunities for those living in poverty cannot be overstated. The incentives to save and work towards a better and healthier future become far more real once you have something to lose. A more convincing discussion of this can be found in the fantastic book Poor Economics.

The truth about social enterprise

For me, Martin’s argument was a very powerful one. His personal experiences seem to resonate with what I have heard during meetings with the business owners we are currently working with. The deciding factor in any venture is the commitment of the people pursuing it. And the investment of your money is a display of that commitment.

These two truths come together in a powerful way through social enterprise: be that by providing decent work, fair pay throughout a supply chain or an affordable and advantageous service. This is what we hope to support at Challenges Worldwide.