The next week, the news reported another carjacking just outside Nairobi in which the occupants were murdered because apparently they resisted. I also heard that two other UN vehicles had been carjacked recently, but they didn’t make the news because no one was killed. It made me nervous about our decision to come to Nairobi, and I did consider whether I should tell Wendy not to get on the plane. However, after carefully processing my concerns, I was mostly able to put them into the background. Except, they definitely reinforced my plan not to drive in Kenya.
Helping me to process the violence were Kenyan friends who told me that these fatal carjackings were very unusual, and they suspected Somali refugees. Kenya had definitely been experiencing a recent upsurge in violence, which many people attributed to the fighting in Somalia. Many Somali refugees were fleeing to Kenya, and sometimes they brought along their military weapons. Because I had registered on the U.S. embassy website and included Wendy’s information, we both received e-mails with the embassy’s travel warning referring to the violence. I had read earlier embassy warnings and this new one wasn’t much different, so I was disturbed, but not too much. Since Wendy hadn’t seen these warnings before, she was seriously taken aback and initially very nervous. However, I was able to reassure her. I thought with a few precautions, it would be easy to minimize, but not totally eliminate, our exposure to violence. Everyone knew to take taxis wherever they went, especially at night. The area where we were living and working was quite safe to walk around during the day but, once again, not at night. Based on empirical evidence, I had already developed what I believed to be important safety rules: Rule # 1: Don’t drive around anywhere in a large new SUV. Rule # 2: Don’t drive alone in isolated areas in any kind of car. Rule # 3: If held up or carjacked, don’t resist or scream; do whatever the criminals request.
While getting accustomed to my new living conditions in Kenya, I was also developing an understanding of the Kenya TechnoServe operations. Before arriving, I had begun to form a conflicted view of the state of TechnoServe’s Kenya office from the bits and pieces of information that I had received and my earlier visit. In one sense, Kenya was a star because it had secured large amounts of funding in the past few years and had tripled in size. It also had very successful projects producing clearly demonstrable benefits for many smallholder farmers. On the other hand, I was getting the impression that the rapid growth was not necessarily under control.
After the first week, I had seen things that supported both points of view, but I didn’t have enough information to form a complete and detailed picture. However, I did think that there was an opportunity to improve the overall management of the Kenya office and to establish good management practices in Uganda. And that’s basically what I was there to do. Because of the huge growth and the new country directors, TechnoServe’s regional VP thought that the Kenya (and Uganda) office could use some support from someone like me with years of business management experience, especially in consulting, providing advice to senior executives in high-growth companies. It seemed like a perfect fit and an opportunity for me to make a significant contribution. My role was going to be very different from the direct client work I had done in Swaziland, but I was looking forward to it. I had put together my objectives, based on my job description from the regional VP, but I needed to sit down with Fred and Erastus to make sure that my ideas aligned with theirs.
After two weeks of work, I had a better understanding of TechnoServe’s operations in Kenya. I’d even started to contribute. The TechnoServe programs in Kenya were mostly doing the right things and helping people the way they were supposed to but without a consistent approach for assuring they were under control. Success relied heavily on the experience and skills of each individual program manager. Like a lot of rapidly growing companies that I’d worked with in Silicon Valley, TechnoServe had grown beyond the informal management systems and processes that worked when the staff was smaller and the projects less complex. Fred, as the new country director, readily admitted the need for more management rigor and had already taken steps to improve the situation. He knew that getting things more thoroughly under control would only enhance his ability to manage and expand the Kenya program. It was good to know he supported this direction and welcomed my help because not all personalities would have. For example, as Fred and I were reviewing the annual budget with our controller, I asked a number of specific questions, which brought up a number of issues regarding our financial situation and management practices. Fred insisted on the spot that we have an offsite session with all of our professional staff to talk about operational management including a big component on financial management, which I would develop and present.
We held the offsite meeting within a week. Fred reviewed our overall budget for Kenya and the funding pattern of our programs. He highlighted the ones that would run out during the year and the need to replenish donor funding to allow the affected teams to continue their work. I gave a presentation on program management with a heavy financial component and explained that Fred and I would be initiating more formal program management procedures with detailed monthly reviews. No one complained because everyone seemed to believe that more of this discipline and structure were needed. Donors, particularly those with a background in the private sector, were becoming increasingly attracted to the TechnoServe approach for development that emphasizes private sector business. However, these donors also demanded very rigorous management of projects and monitoring of results. As these donors contributed more and demanded more, we needed to demonstrate that we could reliably and consistently deliver the results they wanted.
As I learned more about the details of our projects in Kenya, I learned that they were typical of the type of work that TechnoServe was doing in many developing countries. TechnoServe’s tagline is “Business Solutions to Poverty,” and it is essentially a training and consulting organization. Since 80 percent of the world’s poor are smallholder farmers, TechnoServe primarily worked to improve agricultural value chains consisting of smallholder farmers, their suppliers and the buyers of their produce to raise incomes for all of them. This was accomplished by better connecting the various stages of the value chain and improving performance within each stage to produce a self-sustaining market system. In many ways, TechnoServe’s work was analogous to the consulting I had done for many high-technology companies, except we were talking about bananas, milk, cashews, pigs, and coffee instead of computers, semiconductors, and software.
For example, most smallholder farmers are not well connected to markets where their crops can ultimately be sold to consumers. Poor infrastructure, lack of transportation, and wide dispersion often prevent smallholder farmers from selling produce in any market. If a smallholder farmer can sell his produce, beyond what he needs for subsistence, the process typically involves inefficient middlemen (often multiple layers) between the farmer and the consumer. Each of these middlemen wants to make a profit, and so the farmer ends up with a very low price for his produce. Individually, smallholder farmers do not have the resources to do anything about this situation. From the other end of the value chain, it is much too difficult for supermarkets to interact directly with individual small farmers whose output is tiny, often unreliable, and possibly of low quality. In electrical engineering systems, this is known as an impedance mismatch. The solution to the problem in both electronics and economics is to design and implement an interface that doesn’t result in large losses, like those created by the middlemen.
TechnoServe has a comprehensive approach for dealing with this very common situation. First, smallholder farmers are organized into producer groups. These groups have different names and different legal structures, but all have a number of attributes in common. They all allow small farmers to mass their produce and have more direct purchasing arrangements with large buyers, such as food processors or supermarkets. This allows the farmer to have a consistent market and receive a better price for his produce since numerous middlemen margins are eliminated. The farmer group also facilitates interaction with providers of goods and services that will enhance the individual farmer’s productivity. In a simple example, TechnoServe encourages these groups to procure fertilizer and high-yielding seeds in bulk to make them more affordable to each farmer. Also, these groups can contract in quantity for services such as veterinary visits and artificial insemination for dairy cows. Beyond organizing farmers and agricultural value chains, TechnoServe frequently provides training in basic business concepts, agronomy, and the management of cooperatives.
While simple in concept, the changes promoted by TechnoServe are always challenging to implement. People all over the world, in every environment and at every intelligence and economic level resist change. However, if these types of changes are implemented, they can often double a farmer’s income. This can mean moving a farmer from the category of seriously poor (earning $1 per day or less) to working poor (earning $2 per day or more). It can mean that a farmer can pay his children’s school fees, give them decent clothing, and provide for health care. In sum, it can make a huge difference.
Moreover, as a farmer begins to generate a surplus of crops beyond the minimum for subsistence, he can begin thinking about investing that surplus in better tools, equipment, or additional crops that can further improve his economic situation. And the best part of this whole story is that once the markets and the fully functioning value chain are established, they are self-sustaining. They operate on standard free-market principles and can maintain themselves without TechnoServe’s involvement. They continue to be subject to the same threats that challenge any business in a free economy, but they don’t need charity, and that’s what really appeals to me. The economy of the region receives a permanent upgrade, so it can continue to develop from a higher level.
My first field visit in Kenya was to a project that clearly demonstrated the TechnoServe approach in working with banana farmers. TechnoServe and Africa Harvest had been funded by the Rockefeller Foundation to promote banana growing by small farmers north of Nairobi. Africa Harvest is known for its development and promotion of improved banana plants, so it was chosen to help the farmers access, plant, and nurture these plants. TechnoServe’s expertise is in business and value chains, so our focus was on organizing the farmers, training them, and connecting them to reliable markets for their produce.
Although many people believe that successful capitalism just happens, without a push, it can take a very long time. In developing countries, markets are often not efficient or nonexistent, so it’s very easy for value chains to stabilize in suboptimum conditions and not improve. For example, before the Africa Harvest/TechnoServe intervention in Kenya’s banana industry, the value chain operated as follows:
Poor farmers grew bananas primarily as one of their subsistence crops. Sometimes they would produce more than they could consume so would attempt to sell the excess. With no local market for the bananas and no means of transporting them to a major city, smallholders had to rely on random purchases from ad hoc traders. These traders would periodically visit banana farms in a particular area and ask farmers if they had any bananas to sell. If the farmers had bananas to sell, they were at the trader’s mercy in terms of the selling price. If the trader did not buy, then the bananas would not be sold and would ultimately rot. When the farmer had bananas for sale, the trader would eyeball them for quality and weight and would offer the farmer a price. Usually, the farmer accepted.
Although it sounds as if the traders had the upper hand on the farmers, the system was bad for everyone. The traders could find themselves driving through a rural area with very bad roads, expending their time and fuel money, and finding no bananas for sale. They could also find that the available bananas were only of poor quality and not readily saleable in the urban markets at a good price. All transactions were opportunistic. Supply, price, demand, and frequency of transactions were all random. And the most important fact to note about this situation was that none of the small participants involved could change it! Economists call this a market failure. No one had the resources to rationalize and improve the value chain. Without outside intervention, this value chain could have continued in its inefficient state indefinitely. Free markets are great, but sometimes they fail.
TechnoServe’s first step in changing this situation was overcoming a psychological hurdle. In this region, most everyone grew bananas because they were easy to grow and a good source of nutrition for their families. Since everyone grew bananas, many farmers could not understand how bananas could be grown as a reliable and worthwhile cash crop. They didn’t think about the four million inhabitants of Nairobi only fifty miles away who had no farmland. And if they had thought about those potential buyers, it would have seemed a dream that they could connect with them. As individual farmers became convinced of the opportunity, they were encouraged to purchase the new varieties of banana plants, to plant them carefully, in sufficient quantity, and to nurture them with appropriate water, fertilizer, and pruning. By following good direction, the farmers were able to produce excellent quality bananas in consistent volumes. However, better bananas in larger quantities were not sufficient. Many past economic development initiatives had taught farmers how to produce more and better crops but had not connected them to markets to sell their newfound abundance. Without connection to a market, a farmer just ends up throwing away more produce. This project was different. It attacked the overall value chain problem from both ends.
While farmers were being taught to grow more and better bananas, TechnoServe was also developing the demand side of the value chain. Banana wholesalers from Nairobi were recruited to visit the banana farming area with the promise of consistent availability of large volumes of high-quality bananas. This was attractive to the wholesalers because it allowed them to reduce their costs for finding high-quality bananas. The consistent availability also made the wholesalers into reliable suppliers to their retail customers. As the two ends of the value chain came together, the farmers and the wholesalers agreed on specific market days to meet and conduct their transactions. They also agreed to price bananas by weight and grade (quality level). Certain individuals within the farming community were trained to become official banana graders. After the new system began operating successfully, a physical market building and surrounding fenced yard were constructed for the collection, overnight storage, weighing and grading of the bananas on market days. The whole system, although seemingly incredibly simple, had become a tremendous success.
The wonderful thing was that these were real markets, just like those in the economics textbooks. Supply and demand were matched up reliably on a consistent basis, and this is the most important aspect for farmers who are trying to climb out of poverty. Although everyone involved anticipated that the most important result coming from this project would be that farmers were getting better prices for the bananas, it hadn’t been the case. The most important result for farmers had been the certainty and regularity of income. Farmers now knew that if they produced good bananas, they could sell them. That allowed families to plan their finances rather than being constantly uncertain as to whether they could afford to purchase clothing or pay school fees for the children. Many of the farmers had doubled their income. Needless to say, I was very excited with the project and what it had been able to accomplish.
As part of the banana trip, we got to see the actual market taking place with bananas being graded and weighed. We also visited several banana farms to see their growing techniques including, in some cases, new irrigation systems. The irrigation systems had been purchased with the farmers’ increased incomes enabling them to produce more bananas in the dry season when selling prices are the highest.
As an aside, as we drove around the area, I noticed a large compound with a very nice house at the center. I inquired as to who owned this impressive homestead and was told that it was the local MP (member of parliament). I asked, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, if this person had been wealthy before becoming an MP. Everyone in the car laughed loudly and said of course not.
A few days after the banana trip, Wendy arrived in Kenya and learned what her work for the next year would entail. While about 80 percent of TechnoServe Kenya’s project work related to agricultural value chains, such as the banana project, the remaining 20 percent was focused on more general entrepreneurship and consisted of three specific initiatives: Young Women in Enterprise, a national Believe, Begin, Become (BBB) business plan competition, and a small business growth program called “Upscaling.” Wendy would spend her time in Nairobi working on all three. The projects were a good fit with her interests and leveraged her experience in business plus the lessons learned in Swaziland
The banana trip had meant a two-hour drive each way on relatively bad roads. The week after Wendy arrived, she and I went with the TechnoServe Upscaling team for a three-hour drive each way over worse roads. Wendy was starting to help this team in supporting very small businesses to identify and overcome the barriers that prevented them from growing and creating more jobs. Our first visit was to a small honey processing company. It was owned by Mr. and Mrs. Ndambuki but had really been started by the wife. The husband was a pharmacist, and the couple had owned and operated a pharmacy in a small town for many years. They were not rich, but seemed to have a good and stable income, which put them in a better position than most. The honey business was a recent start-up. The honey business had begun serendipitously when an old acquaintance of the wife had come to town in desperate financial condition. Before moving to town, the wife had come from a not too distant rural area. This rural area was quite poor, and the local farmers were always at the mercy of the weather, which that year had not been good for the crops. Many of the farmers were struggling to feed their families. Fortunately, some of the farmers kept bees, which produced saleable honey. Although this honey had usually been consumed by the families, her friend had come to town to sell what he could to buy staples. The wife bought the honey, primarily out of charity, and the desire to preserve her friend’s dignity. She then had to figure out what she would do with it. Since it was too much to personally consume, she decided to process it and sell it in the pharmacy. It worked and she decided to help more of the struggling farmers by purchasing more honey. She processed and sold their honey, and her husband even developed a cough syrup and other pharmaceutical products that incorporated honey.
Mr. and Mrs. Ndambuki now had an additional small business with only one full-time employee, but both were enthusiastic about it because it had been able to help a number of poor farmers. The business had been able to generate enough profits to provide the small amount of cash required for simple equipment and working capital. While it hadn’t contributed to the couple’s disposable income, it hadn’t been a cash drain. They wanted to expand, and that’s how TechnoServe was helping them. The TechnoServe business advisors had helped them to formally register their company and to develop accurate financial statements. Both of these were always prerequisites for obtaining any kind of financing, which the company expected to need soon for growth. The honey business also needed a strategy if they really wanted to grow. Although they had created a brand and packaging for their honey, like many small businesses we saw, their products were mostly undifferentiated.
Many of TechnoServe’s clients sell mostly undifferentiated raw agricultural produce, which is fine if there is a sufficient market and you’re willing to accept the prices that the market offers. However, trying to sell processed, packaged goods is more challenging. To sell these goods, ultimately a consumer will have to choose your product from a retail shelf, where it usually sits competing for attention with other similar products. How do you get the consumer to choose your product or even get the retailer to put your product on his shelf ? It is very difficult to break into supermarkets with this type of product when they already have multiple competing brands on the shelf. Selling honey wasn’t as bad as trying to set up a bottled water company, but it was still a big challenge.
We advised the honey company not to aggressively pursue supermarkets in Nairobi unless they could really differentiate their honey. Alternatively, we suggested a more regional marketing strategy and perhaps pursuing second-tier stores and informal markets in Nairobi where the potential volumes might be lower and the logistics more cumbersome, but the competition would be less fierce. We also suggested emphasizing the honey-containing, proprietary products that they had developed. We felt these could be differentiated and would face less direct competition. The proprietors thanked us for our advice and, as we left, gave us a bag of mangoes from one of their trees. We also got a sample of the honey-based cough syrup.
As we discussed this business in the car, we concluded that there are a lot of similar small businesses with undifferentiated products. They can typically succeed in a small market with a lot of hard work and personal touch from the owners. Good customer service in a small area combined with personal relationships and supported by hard work allows them to provide enough profits for a decent income. However as those who work in marketing and sales know, to expand beyond this size, these businesses cannot rely solely on the charisma and energy of the owners. At this point they need to have some other distinguishing characteristic and/or unique position in their market if they are to grow. This to me is always the largest challenge to business growth (in any country in the world). I hoped the honey business would succeed and grow, but unless they developed their proprietary products, I saw them quickly hitting a ceiling.
Our visit the next day was to a slightly larger firm with better short-term prospects. The company produced and bottled yogurt for sale to retailers. The company had been started by a young accountant who had waited for it to grow before leaving his accounting job to work full time making and selling yogurt. The company provided twelve jobs. It also benefited small, local farmers by purchasing eight hundred liters per day of their milk output. This milk was pasteurized in a large cauldron in a small shed outside a house that had been the accountant’s home. He had originally set up the business in his home, but when the business grew too large, he and his family moved nearby and let the business take over the whole house.
The yogurt production process was pretty simple and very manual. After the milk had been boiled, it was poured into large containers and the yogurt culture was added, which turned the milk into yogurt. Some of the yogurt had strawberry or vanilla flavoring added before bottling for sale. The bottling process was not what you would see in a large beverage company. Two liter pitchers were filled from the large yogurt containers. The contents of the pitchers were then carefully poured into 300 ml and 500 ml plastic bottles, which would be sold at retail. The bottles received heat seals, which were carefully placed by hand and then affixed with the heat from a common laundry iron. The next step was manually attaching the labels and adding the plastic screw cap. The completed bottles were then grouped into dozens and covered with heat-shrinkable plastic. The plastic was shrunk to fit with an industrial strength heat gun. The employee performing this operation said that the business originally used inexpensive handheld hair dryers, but they wore out too quickly.
The owner said that he had more demand for his yogurt than he could supply, so planned to double his capacity. TechnoServe was helping him to get the necessary financing. I asked about product differentiation. He said that people just liked his yogurt. He thought it might be a little thicker than the large commercial brands. One of his larger competitors was beginning to worry about the competition from our entrepreneur’s increasing sales and thought that his success was due to his salespeople. The competitor hired away all the salespeople at much higher salaries, but it only caused a short-term problem for our entrepreneur, and he kept on growing. He was selling locally as well as to many small shops in Nairobi. It sounded as if the short-term prospects were very good for him. Of course, he couldn’t afford to compete head on with the large dairy products company, but he could potentially grow to a company with fifty employees while purchasing milk from hundreds of small farmers. This was already a success story, and it was growing. It was another heartwarming experience where an entrepreneur’s pursuit of profit was creating opportunity and economic growth, and it helped to reassure us that this was a proven path to helping the poor.
A few weeks later, Fred showed us another success story based on another of TechnoServe’s proven approaches to helping the poor. Fred had been really busy and felt the need to take a weekend break out of town with his family at the Outspan hotel in Nyeri. Fortunately, he invited us to go along and made special plans for us. First of all, he took a circuitous route to Nyeri to show us the variety of Kenya’s terrain north of Nairobi. In this area, the Rift Valley meets the watershed of Mount Kenya and evolves into the plains of northern Kenya. As we drove, the landscape varied dramatically depending on the direction of the view.
Fred also wanted to show us the Nyala dairy, a very successful TechnoServe project that he had initiated many years ago. The “dairy” was actually a collection point for the milk from over five thousand smallholder farmers, each of who had typically less than four cows. The farmers delivered their milk by whatever means they could, such as by bicycle or donkey, to Nyala, where it was weighed and tested for quality before being put into the large cooling tank. Once a day, a large tank truck from a commercial milk producer would pick up the milk from the tank. In this way the farmers were assured of a reliable buyer for their output. Based on their record of milk deliveries, farmers could also access credit to purchase supplies such as feed and veterinary medicines. Dairy programs, such as Nyala, had become a model for increasing farmers’ incomes. Dairy farming is particularly attractive in this respect because, in contrast to seasonal crops, it produces output every day.
It was during the trip with Fred and family, while observing many small towns and varying terrain, that I finalized my concept of the Walleigh Bare Dirt Index of Development, for which I expect to be immortalized in the economic development community. My proposition is that the amount of exposed bare dirt in a community is inversely proportional to its level of economic development. Poor communities have a lot of exposed bare dirt, e.g., parking areas in front of stores, side streets, and even main roads. At the other extreme, the most developed communities, e.g., cities in the United States, have no exposed bare dirt. Every square foot of ground is covered by concrete, asphalt, or deliberately planted grass or shrubbery. There is no bare dirt to be muddy when it rains or dusty when it’s dry. Because poor communities have no money to spend on paving roads and parking lots or planting landscaping, as foot or vehicle traffic increases, the natural vegetation is worn down and bare dirt is produced. As a community improves its economic condition, limited funds begin to go into paving and landscaping, but a lot of bare dirt persists. The amount of bare dirt ends up being proportional to the level of poverty and inversely proportional to the level of development. QED. I’m just waiting for the recognition.
Although Wendy worked on all three Kenya entrepreneurship programs, she spent the majority of her time on Young Women in Enterprise (YWE) sponsored by Nike. This innovative program encouraged young women to become entrepreneurs. It provided training in both urban and rural settings around Nairobi, and participants included both high school students and school leavers (meaning dropouts) some of whom were already mothers. Since the Kenyan economy didn’t generate enough jobs to employ all of the people leaving school each year (either through graduation or dropping out), self-employment was seen as a very viable alternative for achieving an income. The YWE program taught young women interpersonal and life skills as well as about business and concluded with each of them developing a short plan for a business that they would actually like to start. These plans were judged, and some of the most promising were awarded small cash prizes, which could be used to help start the business. The girls in all of the sites had completed their assignments and so TechnoServe teams had been going around to the sites to judge the business plan submissions and award prizes to the best.
As part of her YWE role, Wendy had participated in several of these events around Nairobi, but we had both been asked to participate in an all-day session of judging and awards at our most distant rural site. It was about two hours away over mostly poor roads, some under repair with long diversions over stretches of dirt and gravel. Since it was far away, we had been told to be ready to leave the office by 7:00 a.m., so Wendy and I arrived at 6:45. This being Africa, someone didn’t get the word about the 7:00 a.m. departure, so we waited for her and left at 8:30. We already knew it was going to be a late day, but this would obviously make it later.
After the uncomfortable, but not terrible drive, we arrived at the rural school where we were to have the judging and the awards. The school buildings had local stone walls and mostly dirt floors. The small assembly hall had a concrete floor. All of the windows were just openings in the walls that could be closed with steel shutters. There were no lights in the classrooms. The outhouses were behind the school buildings. The exterior features of the outhouses were unremarkable and the interiors were Spartan, a concrete floor with a rectangular opening.
The TechnoServe team set up our operation as quickly as possible, but we were obviously way behind schedule. There were forty-two girls that we would interview. We had planned to have four panels of judges, but we only had enough of us for three. That meant each panel would have to interview additional girls and that would put us even further behind. We plowed ahead.
The process was that each girl would come into one of the judging rooms, briefly describe her business, and then the panel would ask questions. Evaluating the young woman’s answers and her written plan, the judges would award points based on standard criteria. I had no idea what to expect. Our first contestant had me very worried. She came in, said a few quiet greetings, and sat down. The head judge greeted her and tried to make her feel comfortable, explaining that she could answer in Swahili or English, whichever was easier. Then someone asked her to briefly describe her planned business. She just sat there. After a long pause, the judge tried to coax her a bit, offering a question with a simpler answer. The girl finally uttered a few words. It continued in this way for the next twenty minutes. I’m sure it was painful for her. It was definitely painful for the judges. We hoped that all the interviews wouldn’t be that difficult.
The next girl came in, vivacious and confident. She explained her business and why it was going to succeed. She told us how, if she couldn’t raise all the money she needed, she would start the business in a different way with just a small amount and bootstrap it to a larger size. She had already started an informal business doing essentially the same thing. The contrast between the two girls was amazing. Throughout the rest of our interviewees, the diversity was wide. One or two others were very confident and knowledgeable, but there were girls who couldn’t answer the simplest question about a business plan that they had ostensibly written. We suspected a number had been written by their counselors or older siblings.
At the end of the judging, which finished over two hours late, the panels got together and selected the overall winners. We wolfed down some very late lunch and then presented the awards. Parents and relatives of all of the girls had come out to the awards ceremony as had local government officials and politicians. In addition to the prizes for the best plans, each girl got a graduation certificate. Both the parents and the girls were excited. Many of the attendees couldn’t fit in the small assembly hall, but the open doors and windows allowed us to easily observe from outside. As the awards were given, the audience clapped joyfully, especially the parents of the girls who won prizes. At the end of the awards, one of the students gave a brief, impromptu speech thanking everyone for the training and the associated opportunity. Then, one of the fathers stood up and asked to speak. He was an older man; he looked as though he could have been a grandfather, but his daughter had won one of the awards. He mentioned that he had started his own business many years ago and that it had allowed him to provide for his children and send them to school. He was thankful for his own success, and he wanted to thank everyone for the opportunity that was being given to his daughter and all of the other young women. Although he spoke in Swahili, and I didn’t get the translation until later, you could tell that it was a very moving speech by the standing ovation at the end. After his speech, the ceremony was closed with a prayer, and we were ready to pack up and drive the two hours back to Nairobi. It had been a long but rewarding day.
Over the following two weeks, the scene was repeated in a number of communities around Nairobi including several major slums where most of the girls were school dropouts and many of the teenagers had their own children. After participating in many of these sessions, Wendy had an interesting observation. While the quality of plans and the determination of the girls varied in each location, all of the best plans and the highest levels of determination came from school dropouts in very poor areas. I guess it was these girls who understood the economic facts of life and knew that this was a great opportunity for them to change their own situation.
