Students graduate with draft business plan
From just six students in 2006, the program graduated 85 students in 2009, at three sites in the Kibera area.
Helping Langton lead the project is Kirby Leong, a Sauder MBA alumnus who serves as Project Coordinator. The rest of the Sauder project team consists of the “traveling faculty”— two MBA graduates, five MBA students and five UBC undergraduates—and a Vancouver-based volunteer team of five undergraduates and MBA students.
The traveling team spends three weeks teaching young people how to make a business plan, profile customer segments, and manage cash flow. The students “graduate” with a draft business plan.
“The Kenyan participants come from a range of backgrounds. Most have graduated high school, and some have been in university or graduated from a technical school,” says Langton. “About a third have a business, but are struggling with it. Our program helps them preserve and grow the business. Most of the rest want to start a business or gain inspiration for how they could.”
Since 2007, the Sauder team has been joined by a team of business students from Nairobi’s Strathmore University.
“Sauder leads the project, but we are fortunate Strathmore is involved. The Strathmore team provides local context and support to make sure we are helping participants develop appropriate business plans. The Strathmore team also helps the Sauder team understand local conditions and culture,” says Langton.
St. Aloysius: true social entrepreneurship
This past year, SE101 took an important next step into social entrepreneurship by running a pilot project for the St. Aloysius Gonzaga School, a Kibera school for AIDS orphans. Barlet Jaji (a local SE101 team member in 2007, and now post-graduate training director at St. Aloysius) suggested bringing SE101 to St. Aloysius, even though doing so would require some adjustments to the program.
“This was a new approach for us. The students were younger than we are used to, and had to work in groups, instead of as individuals,” says Langton. “On the other hand, their focus was on building business plans to solve social problems such as garbage collection, water distribution and recycling. This is important work given the scant public sector in Kibera.”
Realizing the budding social entrepreneurs needed a different sort of help and advice, Langton and Leong agreed to choose some MBA participants with technical backgrounds for the 2010 team to help the student groups think about working with such areas as solar panels and water distillation.
“We can see that working with this aspect of social entrepreneurship will require the SE101 team to have more engineering or technical skills, so we are going to expand that,” says Langton.
The St. Aloysius project differs from other SE101 projects because it is ongoing. “Barlet Jaji and the Strathmore team are continuing to work with the St. Aloysius groups, helping them refine their business plans,” says Langton. “The best of these will be sent to Sauder to help attract project finance from micro-financiers, charities and Sauder alumni.”
Langton believes financing “in kind” is preferable to direct investment.
“Direct cash handover is probably not the best way. We would seek to invest through infrastructure and equipment.”