Tuesday 7.24.12
The past two days gave us perspective on where the young
African entrepreneurs come from – the village and the city slums. Today we met
with existing businesses that have been mentored or funded by WFL in the past
couple of years.
First we met with Morris and his team who provide outsourced
technical support – traditional local IT support, pc and network break/fix
services, and software/customer support internationally. It was refreshing to
see a vibrate business competing on the global stage. Morris’s employees are on
pay for performance plans that can make them 1.5 MM UGX monthly ($20/day), which
solidly puts them in the middle class. Contrast that with the next business we
visited, an egg business, they pay their employees 50,000 UGX monthly (less than
a $1/day). A 30x wage gap is a simple reminder that education and skill
development is a must for progress.
Next we met with Alice and Winnie, who used their 11MM
(~$4,500) UGX loan to buy 700 chicks and grew them to full sized egg laying hens
in 8 months and have been producing 10-12 trays (30 eggs per tray) for the past
7 months resulting in profit of 1.4 MM UGX ($600) monthly, which will be a good
income for the 2 business owners once the debt service has been retired. In
this case the loan is working - giving two people more money, but not making a
bigger impact.
Education, skill development, and commerce works.
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