Business Woman

Friday 5th March 2010
7:21pm
Today I had the opportunity to give my second educational, community wide, workshop. What were these fabulous workshops on? Nutrition? Transmission of HIV? Health related at all?! Nope. I gave two sessions on how to write a professional Business Plan. You may be asking yourself, “What the heck does Darryn, being a nurse and HIV/AIDS educator, know about business plans?!” All I can say is that I now know more than I ever wanted to. :-P

The government of Swaziland is currently in the process of trying to stimulate their economy by giving out grants to start small businesses, which as I understand it never have to be paid back. The forms that my community members were filling out last week at Umphagatsi (weekly community meeting at chiefdom level) had asked for a business plan. I was continually asked to write these documents for people! Ummm… no thank you. I remembered that my PCV friend, Justine, had been previously working with an NGO called TechnoServe that focused on teaching high school youth the basics of business. I instantly excused myself from the meeting and called her in fit of desperation, and pleaded for her help! She said that she could easily teach me everything I needed to know about writing a business plan for a small Swazi business, so we made a sleepover date for the weekend. The community scheduled a Business Plan Writing Session with Zodwa for Monday morning. Have to admit I was pretty nervous. :-/

The following day a woman in my community asked me to explain how to fill out the three page application form. After describing the difference between a physical address and a postal address, I started to feel a bit more qualified to teach about business. I realized that whatever I taught was going to have to be VERY basic. Justine’s high school curriculum was exactly that! I could easily handle the topics included in a business plan such as, markets and competition, start-up budget tables, product/service description, and business location! As Justine put it, “Yay for our well rounded education”! With my flip chart paper (reminds of a Swazi version of power point –everyone uses it!!) and my high school business manual I walked into my first workshop teaching experience in Swaziland. And no one was there.

As I should have expected people, including my translator, didn’t arrive until about 1/2hour to an hour later than the starting time. A few people were there because they wanted to include a business plan in their application for the government grant and a few others were actually there for a school committee meeting and decided instead to see what crazy Zodwa was going to do. :-P I expected many more people to attend, since there were so many people applying for the grant. Come to find out the deadline for the application forms were the day they decided to have my session, so a large number of the applicants decided to run their papers to the chiefdom in the morning. Oh well.

I am declaring that session a success for two main reasons. Firstly, the people in the lesson really seemed to grasp the concepts we were discussing, especially when using examples like chicken projects, hair salons, and khumbi drivers. Secondly, they were so impressed with the section on writing a budget that they wanted me to give the same presentation today so they could get more community members to come! Yay to a teaching success story! I did give the same discussion today and more people came, even a few men who were at Monday’s lesson.

Looking in the TechnoServe curriculum manual I have decided to suggest and offer to teach about marketing and basic bookkeeping. I think they are going to take me up on it! So, when I return to the States don’t be surprised if I have all the skills to become a Forbes 500 person (is that even right?) in no time! :-P

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of my teachers and the entire education system (although flawed) for giving me well rounded education. Those of you who are teachers or are studying to be teachers thank you. You don’t even know how much you are impacting the future of your students, or when they are going to have to pull out the information that you are bestowing on them. God bless you all!