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

a while, the monkey calmly left. It was just a brief encounter but was one of the many small clues that reminded us that we weren’t in California. As we settled in over the next few weeks, we frequently saw families of monkeys playing among the eucalyptus off to the side of our house and occasionally in the mulberry tree in our front yard. It was almost like a visit to the zoo every day.

On Monday, we started work, and the first thing we saw when we went to the office was the morning paper. The front-page story, complete with picture, was about a woman who was seriously burned in an outhouse explosion. As the very detailed article explained, evidently someone had been using gasoline to clean grease off some car parts. After completing the cleaning, the excess solvent and dissolved grease had been thrown down the local outhouse. Shortly thereafter the unsuspecting woman had sat down to do her business, and while sitting, lit up a cigarette and threw the match down the hole. The resulting explosion did extensive damage to the outhouse and seriously burned the woman in some sensitive areas. However, she was expected to fully recover. That was the major national news story in Swaziland that day.

We learned that the flavor of Monday’s front-page story was typical, and Tuesday’s front page didn’t disappoint as it combined human interest with politics. It was about the speaker of Parliament and his speech on the sexual performance of Swazi men. Swaziland had the world’s highest rate of AIDS with its resulting mortality. The death rate from AIDS was of great concern to the government since it typically killed young adults in their most economically productive years and often left orphans behind. It was well known that the major cause of the AIDS epidemic in Swaziland was multiple concurrent partners engaging in unprotected sex. The parliament was debating whether they could do anything to remedy this situation and reduce the rate of AIDS. At this point, the speaker of the Parliament arose and gave an impassioned speech. He said that the major problem was that too many Swazi men did not know how to sexually satisfy their wives. Consequently, the women were seeking satisfaction with other partners and causing the AIDS problem. He exhorted Swazi men to do a better job of satisfying their wives and keeping them at home. We learned that stories like these or features on domestic violence and corruption frequently grabbed the daily headlines because Swaziland did not play a major role in geopolitics. For us, the novelty of reading the local tabloids quickly wore off.

Getting down to work, we spent our first week getting started on our primary projects. Wendy began working with Atiba, a TechnoServe colleague, to create a School-Age Youth Entrepreneurship (SAYE) program to inspire a pool of school-age (teens and early twenties) Swazis to become entrepreneurs. The primary activities within the program would be to introduce these youth to the business world and the skills necessary to create a business. Although the government, banks, and the local offices of a few international corporations provided good jobs for some of the best students, the country had 50 percent unemployment, and many people felt that they had to leave for South Africa to find a decent job. The hope was that with business knowledge and especially entrepreneurship skills, young Swazis might find or even create economic opportunity in their own country. Wendy was a perfect fit for the role, and Leslie was happy to have someone with Wendy’s prior experience in Junior Achievement.

For their first activity, Atiba and Wendy met with several groups in rural and urban areas to understand how to leverage any existing youth-oriented business/entrepreneurship activities, especially the already-established “pre-voc” (prevocational or school-to-work) pilot schools. Their experience in visiting two of the “pre-voc” schools and meeting with some of the graduates quickly convinced them that this was a “big aid” experiment that had failed.

The pre-voc program had supposedly been catalyzed by Mozambicans’ migration to Swaziland during their civil war. These refugees came with nothing, but many started their own tiny businesses and over time began to hire Swazis. Seeing the immigrant Mozambicans hiring Swazis made the Swazi government very uncomfortable, and so they decided that their students needed better classes in entrepreneurship. They received a big grant from the Africa Development Bank. Farm machinery, farm animals, new labs, and classrooms were purchased and placed in sixteen pilot schools across the country. After only a few meetings, it was clear to Wendy and Atiba that the “pre-voc” programs had significant problems. Among the obvious problems were the four large tractors that were purchased for training students but never delivered to the high schools and the minimal animal husbandry that could be taught because the animals at many schools were exclusively female.

According to the teachers, the program had been imposed on them and the schools from above, inadequately marketed to parents and teachers, and implemented with minimal teacher training. Also angering parents and teachers was the lack of impact measurement or additional certification for students who completed the program. The pre-voc program originators also improperly set expectations by promising but then not delivering financial support for graduated pre-voc students to start businesses.

As Wendy and Atiba continued their research, another visit was hosted by a native Swazi who had graduated from Colorado State University and then earned a master’s degree from Colorado School of Mines before returning to Swaziland. Five years earlier, his village’s young boys had banded together to explore how to create businesses so that they could become employed. As expected of many group efforts, less than 20 percent of the students did more than 80 percent of the work on the initial bean-growing project, but the project still achieved a $100 profit. Five years later, the profit had not been used, no other businesses had been started, and the bean-growing success had not been sustained. It was clear that the youth did not understand how to create a viable business. The young men were still living at home with no income source of their own. Although some of the young men had once displayed initiative, the Swazi host for the visit felt that most of the young people lacked motivation.

The next meeting occurred between TechnoServe and LULOTE, a training firm that TechnoServe had identified as a potential local partner. Everyone in the meeting agreed that the pre-voc education was not adequately preparing students for entrepreneurship and was unlikely to become the foundation for TechnoServe’s planned youth program. They also discussed other possibilities. No one knew of any existing program in Swaziland that actually provided hands-on learning about business such as how businesses start and how the money system works. Any advice for small businesses and the few entrepreneurs in the country was offered only by paid consultants. Even UNISWA (the University of Swaziland) only offered theoretical courses on business without any experiential content. From her prior experience, Wendy knew that Junior Achievement had established successful programs in multiple African countries as well as in numerous developing countries in Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America. After further discussion, there was agreement that Junior Achievement would be the best platform on which to build the Swazi youth program. Wendy was assigned to make the initial inquiries to Junior Achievement about starting a new country program in Swaziland. For her first step, she arranged for Atiba, Leslie, and herself to meet with the director of the JA South Africa office in Johannesburg. On the same trip, they also planned to visit a one-stop business center, cofounded and cofunded by multiple financial and consulting organizations, that helped budding entrepreneurs in Johannesburg to get information and the support they would need to start and operate businesses.

Later, the combined TechnoServe and LULOTE team met with the chief inspector in the Ministry of Education and four of his key staff to validate their findings on the pre-voc program. The role of the chief inspector is to monitor the quality of secondary education across Swaziland. The discussion was frank, and despite some finger-pointing at teachers and the poor marketing of the program, the inspectors seemed to agree that the pre-voc program was not successful and unlikely to change without a major overhaul. Additionally distracting to the inspector’s staff was a concurrent initiative to implement the new International General Certificate for Secondary Education (IGCSE) based on the British education model. The ministry seemed to look to TechnoServe and LULOTE as experts to help solve their problems, and the team did agree to come back to them with some possible strategies.

While Wendy was starting on the youth program, I learned that my focus would be on working with specific entrepreneurs who needed help creating or growing businesses, consistent with TechnoServe’s local mandate. In many countries, TechnoServe worked primarily with smallholder farmers and agro-processing companies since 80 percent of the world’s poor were farmers. However, in Swaziland, the focus was on helping people to start or grow small and medium enterprises in any industry, which could also include agriculture. Since the program in Swaziland was new, we had a two-pronged approach. We accepted requests for help from anyone with reasonable business prospects while at the same time we broadly researched the local economy to see what industries or agricultural sectors in Swaziland might be able to become reasonably competitive.

My first two clients had come to TechnoServe for help. Prior to my arrival, they both had met briefly with Leslie and dropped off their business plans. I spent my first week familiarizing myself with their plans before meeting with them in person. The first one that I studied was MPE Timbers. Their plan was to pressure-treat wooden poles with preservatives. Pressure treating allows electric and telephone utilities to put poles into the ground where they resist rotting and destructive insects for many years. Swaziland didn’t have a high-quality pole treatment company, but they had lots of raw timber for poles. A large portion of Swaziland is covered with commercial forests, also known as timber plantations. As we later drove through these areas, we saw miles and miles of straight trees growing in straight rows at regular spacing. It was obvious that Mother Nature had some help in creating these forests.

Swaziland’s electric utility company was conducting a program of rural electrification using imported pressure-treated poles. With seemingly ready access to raw material and no local competition, our entrepreneurs, Brian and Robert, had seen a business opportunity. They had found a used pressure-treating facility that was for sale, so they put in some of their own money, recruited some investors, took out a loan from the local development agency, and started a company. The loan was secured by the equipment to be purchased, but also personally guaranteed. As Brian and Robert surveyed their market and access to further capital, they heard nothing but good news. Their business plans showed high profitability and a very quick payback on their investment, especially for large utility poles, which were in high demand as both Swaziland and South Africa expanded their electrical transmission grids. The used equipment that the entrepreneurs had located was larger and more expensive to purchase and install than what they had originally planned, but it would allow them to treat large utility poles, so they expanded their plans for the factory and moved forward with confidence. As they installed the equipment and constructed the required buildings for the plant, their cash began to run low, and they sought additional financing. Although the climate for investment had seemed very bright before, it suddenly became dark, and they could not get funds. They tried many sources, but although they were complimented on their business plans, every institution turned them down.

After much searching, they were introduced to a local investor who said that