From Silicon Valley to Swaziland by Rick & Wendy Walleigh (read aloud txt) 📖

Believe, Begin, Become in Kenya

After our trip to Uganda, we returned to our regular “routine” in Nairobi. Wendy split her time between Young Women in Enterprise and the Believe, Begin, Become business plan competition. I continued to support Fred, primarily acting as his deputy country director with a focus on strengthening our internal administrative processes. We had made significant progress, and I felt good about my contributions so far. In the finance arena, I had provided project managers with better reporting on their spending. Since financial reports from headquarters only came out quarterly and were often late, project managers didn’t have up-to-date information on their spending. This often caused them to overspend or to be overly cautious and not fully spend their funds when they could have been especially useful. I became familiar with our local finance system, dug into the monthly numbers, and created timely financial reports on Excel spreadsheets. I gave these reports to all of the project managers to help them keep their spending more in line with budgets. I also monitored spending levels myself and sat down with several project managers when I noticed their rate of spending would exhaust their funds before the project was supposed to end. With more timely information, we avoided several potential overruns. I also instituted regular, formal project status reporting to keep Fred fully informed and to assure that projects were on track and getting results. A third important change was to establish local project files in distinctive “blue binders” to assure that all relevant documentation on each project could be readily accessed without having to request that it be sent from headquarters when there was a question. While I knew that these changes would improve the quality of project management and ultimately deliver more benefits to our clients, I also missed the direct contact I’d had helping small businesses in Swaziland where my impact was more direct and tangible.

During this period, we lived on Rapta Road, and every morning on our way to work would pass the offices of IOM where there was always a queue of people waiting long before the offices opened. IOM stands for International Organization for Migration and among their goals is “to provide humanitarian assistance to migrants in need, including refugees and internally displaced people.” We realized that the people in the queues must be refugees from Somalia where the turmoil was generating a constant flow of displaced people into Kenya. We never knew what happened to people after they got to IOM. We hoped that they got better lives, but it just pointed out to us how easy it was to ignore someone else’s ongoing tragedy as we carried on with our normal life.

On a brighter note, we noticed that the government of Nairobi was progressing on their beautification of the city. There was a lot of planting going on. Borders of small flowering shrubs were popping up next to city sidewalks and in median strips (reducing the bare dirt index). To protect their investment and prevent pedestrians from trampling the vulnerable shrubs, the government had adopted a strategy that would never survive in the United States. Discreetly supported by wooden posts and strung throughout the shrubs were taut strands of barbed wire. Without the extreme fear of liability litigation that would typically result in the United States, the Nairobi government was determined not to let their beautification investment get wasted and destroyed by uncaring pedestrians.

Wendy’s support of Believe, Begin, Become (BBB), TechnoServe’s first business plan competition in Kenya was very different from what she did for the BBB in Swaziland. And the Kenya effort was on a vastly larger scale from any other TechnoServe business plan competition. TechnoServe had partnered with Kenya’s Ministry of Youth Affairs (MOYA) to sponsor the competition, and it was receiving a much higher level of attention than in any other previous country. In previous countries, we had received up to six hundred entries, and in Kenya, we expected between five and ten thousand. We were also planning to provide over forty hours of training simultaneously in eight locations to the anticipated three hundred semifinalists. MOYA wanted a high-profile way to support young people (into their thirties) in a country where their unemployment rate was approximately 40 percent. They also wanted to make the program very geographically fair and attract entrants from every area of Kenya, not just the larger cities. With her extensive marketing background and since she had participated in the BBB program in Swaziland, Wendy was perfectly positioned to provide broad marketing support to the team including writing press releases, developing marketing materials, and creating the training for the initial recruiting sessions.

Because of her marketing role, Wendy was able to tag along to the formal presentation of simulated donation checks to TechnoServe, hosted by Kenya’s vice president at his office! She shook hands with the VP as well as the minister and permanent secretary (PS) of MOYA. Besides the TechnoServe representatives, there were several senior executives from private sector companies including: managing director of Lenovo for eastern and southern Africa, the chairman of the Kenya Pipeline Company, and one of the board of directors from Kenya Commercial Bank. TechnoServe was receiving dummy checks for forty-five million Kenyan Shillings from MOYA, seven million from Lenovo, and one million from Kenya Commercial Bank (70 Ksh = U.S. $1). The press snapped photos while the ministry recorded the speeches.

Wendy was on a roll. Within two weeks, she had accompanied TechnoServe colleagues to meetings with Kenya’s vice president, the minister of Youth Affairs and permanent secretaries of both Youth Affairs and the Education Ministries. She had been seen on Kenyan TV twice! In her meetings, she was particularly impressed by both the vice president and the PS of the Youth Affairs Ministry. She told me that the PS of Youth Affairs was very knowledgeable and quick-thinking when responding to questions from the press. Wendy also said that he gave the impression of a venerable African chieftain who truly wanted the best for his people and was very accessible. She predicted he would have a long and successful political career.

Because BBB was such a large endeavor for our office, it wasn’t long before I got involved as well. To aggressively promote BBB, we were doing awareness days throughout the country. In the larger venues, these sessions consisted of stage shows that alternated singing, dancing, and other entertainment with short inspirational talks on business. In the more remote areas, the gatherings were smaller and focused totally on business learning rather than entertainment. Wendy and I went to a midsized city, Nyeri, where the event was presented on a temporary stage that had been erected in an open field that apparently was a city park. It had rained heavily the night before, so the field, which didn’t have much grass, was an oozing plain of mud. Despite the conditions, the firm that had been hired to promote the event was able to attract nearly two thousand people by driving around the city with a loudspeaker truck. The people who came seemed very interested and stayed around for hours paying close attention. There were a lot of young people who seemed intrigued.

Wendy and I stood behind the table in the TechnoServe booth, handed out application forms with the training brochure she had developed. We also answered questions when the questioner spoke English. Many of the teenagers seemed to want to engage us in conversation just because we were obviously foreigners. We were the only Wazungu (white people) to be seen in