Project update!

I got braids!! And I LOVE them. So a quick update on what I’ve been up to:

- we visited the rural communities and 10 individual families to get their story and their picture. We wanted this information to put into the business proposal so that whoever partners up with Lupwa would know exactly who they were helping out. Meeting all these families was such a nice experience because we got to see the conditions that the women lived in. Their mud-houses and straw huts are all they have and you have to walk at least 15 minutes to get to a neighbour or a garden for food. It was also a shock to me to see how many children they take care of. So many orphans rely on their relatives for shelter and food because they have no where else to go. They live so far away from the city that there are no orphanages, health clinics or schools nearby.

A fraction of how many tomatoes they produce

One of the communities is a 40 minute walk away from the roadside, and it just so happened that the morning of, it had rained here in Zambia. And it NEVER rains here during the winter. It was SO cold that day – everyone busted out their winter jackets and sweaters to wear. It was really unusual. But the weather is better now!

After our meetings we worked really hard on getting our proposal together, as well as a visual presentation of our proposal and a cover letter. We were preparing for our meeting with one of the richest men in Zambia, Dr. Rossi! Just a reminder: he owns 6 hotels and was the head of the business network association here. We printed everything out the day before and practiced for our presentation (it cost us 1.10 for ONE coloured page. Bah super expensive. And it cost $0.40 for a black and white page. It’s definitely $0.09 at UOttawa).
Here is the link to our visual presentation: http://prezi.com/lx7d83jcdj4z/​shared-world-initiative-and-lu​pwa-lwabumi-trust-social-enter​prise-partnership/

Our meeting went extremely well and Dr. Rossi gave us many tips for a successful business plan. He encouraged us to go big and target the supermarkets, however he couldn’t offer us contact information for his purchasing officers at his hotels because the restaurant portion doesn’t belong to him (anymore). We can still contact these restaurants but we don’t know if it’ll be reasonable because they order from a company on demand (since they don’t always require 10 boxes of tomatoes/week). Following the meeting, we went to an Indian restaurant which was SUCH a nice treat. We wanted to take the weekend off because we had worked so hard, but just as we’re about to eat dinner that night, the head of Bwafwano came to pick up Jason (our prof) to go out that night. We then joined their conversation and made a few connections.

As I mentioned in past blogs, Bwafwano is a community based organization (CBO) that kind of got ‘screwed’ over from the elections. They used to be funded by the UN’s food programme but the UN pulled out when the party that wants to be re-elected stated that Zambia is doing really well in terms of hunger (just to make themselves look good). So Bwafwano was affected and now only relies on Cecily’s Fund – another organization based in Europe which provides them grants for food. To feed the kids, Bwafwano goes to the markets every week and buys vegetables to make the kids some healthy meals. They go to the same market that our women sell their vegetables at. So, OUR new market can potentially be Bwafwano and the empowerment can be 3-fold. We’d be empowering the women in the rural communities by providing them with a constant income, we’d be empowering Lupwa by helping it become self-sustainable and no longer tied down by donor restrictions, and lastly, we’d be empowering Bwafwano because we would help continue feeding its children with healthy vegetables.

We had a meeting with the purchasing officer from Bwafwano this week and we’ll be hearing back soon. We were also reminded of Bwafwano’s initiative to be self-sustainable (which is mentioned below in another blog post): growing chickens. We visited the chickens that same day and we are going to try to help them find a market for them.

That’s our project up until now. It’s been a super busy week and time is definitely running out. A definite learning experience is that projects take WAY more than 8 weeks to complete. We probably won’t see any results before we leave but we’re planning on creating documents and files that will help with the continuation of this future partnership.