From Silicon Valley to Swaziland by Rick & Wendy Walleigh (psychology books to read .TXT) đź“•
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Although in Africa I wasn’t consulting to high-growth, high-tech companies, most of the basic principles still applied, and my clients were very appreciative. I learned about the banana and pig businesses and the challenges of managing an international NGO, but I was helping my clients with basic business analysis and consulting skills as I learned the specifics of each enterprise. Wendy directly applied her skills from Junior Achievement to start up JA Swaziland and to support Young Women in Enterprise in Kenya. She also utilized her marketing communication, sales training, and start-up experience across a broad set of projects and other support activities.
My third recommendation is to do something that makes you feel good about yourself. At this point in our lives, we’ve already achieved most of our career success and made most of the money we’re going to make. It’s at this time that most people start thinking about other aspects of their lives. Many people ask themselves questions such as, “Have I lived a good life? Am I proud of what I’ve done?” After thinking about these questions, people who have been fortunate in their lives often want to give back something to society. There are many ways that you can do this and feel good about yourself. It does feel good to directly see the impact of your work or have someone thank you for your help, so you should consider these things as you choose your path. However, in the end, it’s not important what other people say or think about you. What’s most important to you is what you think about yourself. Do something that makes you internally proud of yourself.
My fourth recommendation is, “Don’t get discouraged with failure.” If you’re pursuing a wild idea or trying to change the world, it may not happen overnight. It may not happen at all or at least in the way you envisioned. If you have a background in the culture of Silicon Valley, this may be easier to accept. In Silicon Valley, we try to do amazing things all the time. Sometimes they work out. A lot of times they don’t, and we move on to try something else. Bad things will happen; obstacles will get in your way, but you will make a difference. Sometimes platitudes really do apply. Accept what you can’t control. Move on and do your best. It’s better to light one candle than curse the darkness.
A number of my consulting clients in Swaziland were not successful. Wendy’s track record was much better. Her youth program ultimately became an international chapter of Junior Achievement, but it still struggled at times during the years that followed. Overall, we didn’t change the world, but we were able to help some people and feel good inside about what we’d done.
My last message is, “You don’t have to be a hero or a martyr.” You can do good work and at the same time enjoy the opportunities. Wendy and I did a lot of travel and saw a lot of local sites when we were in Africa. Take advantage and don’t feel guilty.
In the end, what are you waiting for? Start planning, and when you’re ready, just do it!
Epilogue
What’s Happened Since leaving Africa?
Since returning to the United States, I’ve continued to work with TechnoServe, on a part-time basis, primarily leading internal operations improvement projects as the organization has continued its rapid growth. In addition to keeping me occupied with interesting and worthwhile activities, my association with TechnoServe has allowed me to partially monitor the ongoing progress of the clients and projects that we worked on in Swaziland and Kenya.
In Swaziland, the Junior Achievement (JA) Program that Wendy coestablished has been one of the ongoing success stories. From 2008 through 2012 over fifteen thousand students participated in the entrepreneurship courses taught by JA. Among these courses is the JA Company program in which participants establish actual small companies to produce and sell products. The most successful of these companies compete on a local, regional, and continental basis. In 2011 and 2012, the winning company from Swaziland also won the all-Africa title. This is a hopeful sign for a country that sorely needs entrepreneurs.
Another entrepreneurship initiative with sustainable impact has been the BBB (Believe, Begin, Become) Business Plan Competition and its “aftercare.” When few new businesses were set up even by the winners of the first business plan competition, TechnoServe established an “aftercare” program to continue to coach the winning entrepreneurs through the challenges of the start-up process. TechnoServe also created a self-help organization for the non-winning graduates to allow them to share experiences and provide mutual support. The combination of these two initiatives has significantly increased the number of new businesses emerging from the business plan competitions. Further, as TechnoServe anticipated the end of the business plan competitions in Swaziland and the related support, they packaged their training materials into an entrepreneurship train-the-trainer course and shared it with other business development organizations for their use on an ongoing basis.
As for my clients, MPE Timbers seemed to pull away from contact with TechnoServe after Wendy and I left Swaziland. However, colleagues in the TechnoServe office heard that MPE got funding and began to build the drying kiln necessary to process large poles. When TechnoServe attempted to discover more about their progress, MPE became evasive and did not want to share information. No one from TechnoServe ever heard about a thriving pole treatment business, so we assume that they were not successful in actually starting the business.
As for Phiwa and Tasty Meals, it was obvious before we left Swaziland that the prospects for Tasty Meals were not good. Phiwa shut down the business and took an engineering job in South Africa to make as much money as he could to pay off his debts.
Despite all the efforts of the Dairy Board and its motivated leader, the smallholder dairy industry in Swaziland continues to struggle and has not been a source of significant economic growth. Unfortunately, neither has pork. With further analysis, Mkhululi discovered that Swaziland’s large quantity of pork imports, which he hoped to replace with domestic production, were primarily processed pork and Swaziland did not have sufficient processing to make a large addition to domestic pork production viable, although some small pork farmers were helped to be successful.
Organic cotton was also a short-lived initiative, but with increasing world prices, nonorganic cotton has become a very viable crop for Swaziland. TechnoServe has worked with the government to revitalize Swaziland’s once-thriving cotton sector with very positive results to date.
The horticulture sector has also been a success story. The entrepreneur, Sdemane Farming, who lost a crop to the hailstorm, has been very successful with TechnoServe’s comprehensive support in production, marketing, and financing. Sdemane continues to grow premium baby vegetables for the European export market. TechnoServe has had a number of additional successes in the horticulture segment including a project to grow chili peppers for a famous producer of hot sauce.
Although it’s a small industry in a small country, TechnoServe was also successful in building the honey sector in Swaziland. Honey gave TechnoServe an opportunity to use its full value chain approach as they provided technical assistance to hundreds of beekeepers, built the capacity of the local honey processor ESKH, and promoted the establishment of the National Honey Council.
Perhaps the most impactful TechnoServe Swaziland initiative has been in handcrafts, a sector with opportunity that had not yet been identified when Wendy and I were in Swaziland. Once again, TechnoServe utilized a comprehensive value chain approach, working with thirteen individual handcraft companies, as well as the industry as a whole. At the individual company level, TechnoServe improved the focus and profitability of the firms by teaching them how to use return on investment analysis along with other business tools. With improved business focus and support in product design and marketing, TechnoServe assisted many of these companies to access the export market for their products. At the industry level, TechnoServe was instrumental in creating the collective marketing platform Pure Swazi, and in building the capacity of SWIFT, the Swaziland Fair Trade organization. An internal evaluation of the program estimated the impact at $1.7 million in incremental revenue to the local industry. This directly improved the lives of 2,500 formal sector workers and perhaps an additional fifteen to twenty thousand rural handcrafters.
TechnoServe in Kenya has also been very successful in the past five years. At the end of our 2007 stay, the TechnoServe Kenya office was facing the prospect of significant downsizing as a large project came to a close. Fortunately, two large proposals at the time were successful, resulting in the hiring of many more employees to staff them. One of these projects was in the dairy sector and followed in the footsteps of Nyala Dairy and other similar TechnoServe projects in Kenya. Thousands of smallholder dairy farmers were organized into cooperatives or similar business groups around chilling plants where they could deliver their milk for bulking and ongoing transport to major milk processors. These solutions increased the farmers’ incomes as well as providing them access to credit and critical supplies for their farms. This project was replicated in Uganda and Rwanda.
The other successful proposal was for the largest project that TechnoServe had ever performed. Now in its second phase, this project focuses on improving the growing and processing of coffee across East Africa and has increased incomes for hundreds of thousands of coffee farmers. Because of its proximity to the equator, its altitude, and its soil conditions, East Africa has some of the best coffee-growing land in the world. This meant that East African farmers had the potential to grow outstanding coffee for the expanding specialty coffee market represented by Starbucks and other premium coffee sellers. However, due to their agronomic and processing practices, many farmers were only able to sell their coffee into the mediocre commodity market, losing the potential for large increases in the selling price of their coffee. TechnoServe again took a comprehensive value chain approach and assisted individual farmers with their practices in the field, farmer groups with their processing mills, and the industry in general as they campaigned for better regulations and laws. TechnoServe also worked with the farmer business groups and cooperatives to improve their business practices and promote openness to members on the details of their finances and operations, occasionally exposing corruption.
TechnoServe Kenya has also begun new projects in horticulture and youth entrepreneurship training. The office now has more than one hundred employees.
On the individual front, Jacqui was the winner of Kenya’s BBB business plan competition who defied doctors’ orders after her emergency appendectomy to deliver her final presentation. Her company, Language Solutions, has continued to expand and now offers foreign and local language training, translation of written documents, and simultaneous interpretation services for live meetings. When last contacted, she had approximately twenty employees and had used her prize money to develop her online services and to reach out to international clients. She had been frequently featured in the Kenya media as a role model.
Cecilia, the regional winner of the Young Women in Enterprise (YWE) competition, has continued to overcome adversity while growing her successful business. Around the time we left Kenya, Cecilia acquired a new knitting machine as well as a contract to produce sweaters for school uniforms. This combination allowed her to hire several part-time workers. Shortly thereafter, she acquired enough retail and wholesale knitting clients to open a store at Nairobi’s Kenyatta Market.
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