After conducting extensive research, Swaziland Volunteer Lily developed an 8-week curriculum for women in her community.
Today, over 200 women across Lily’s host country have graduated from her course and are harnessing their potential and creating their own small businesses!
I sat at the table, shoulder to shoulder with Ugandan mentors who were chosen by our youth at Camp StartUp North. With the camps over, our young innovators have gone back to their communities and identified mentors to help guide them as they build their business ideas. At the front of the table stood Sam, a representative of our national partner, Youth Alive, talking about StartUp Uganda. I’ve lived and breathed this idea for the last 10 months. Dreamed about it and have had it keep me awake many nights. And now, the idea has been shared and was being talked about, owned, by someone other than me and my core team. Sitting on the sidelines, it was a surreal, beautiful moment to reflect on where we started to how far we’ve come in a short amount of time. And how we continue to move forward, creating opportunities to connect Ugandan entrepreneurs, ideas, and empowering youth to launch their ideas. 🚀
The past two weeks have been a WHIRLWIND – aside from Counterpart Day and visiting our future sites (see the last post), we also had the culminations of our work during training – the Product Fair for our entrepreneurship youth group, co-teaching our last class with our counterpart teachers, planning a group Teacher Training, teaching a mock class to our fellow Trainees, going to lots of Spanish classes, and writing lots of essays about our experiences, in both English and Spanish.
First, I finally want to tell you more about the entrepreneurship youth group we’ve been holding throughout training. Basically, my training town group and I have had a group of especially bright 10th and 11th graders (usually about 5-8 people), meeting once or twice every week to develop a product idea and a microbusiness, then applying lessons about feasibility, creativity, SWOT analysis, point of equilibrium, finances, teamwork, and marketing to their business and creating a full business plan.
Our group initially had had difficulty deciding on a product, but finally chose to create an all-natural pesticide and fertilizer that was good for the planet. It was a logical choice, seeing as literally everyone and their cousin here has a garden with lots of fruit trees and other plants. We struggled a lot with attendance sometimes, with different kids coming different weeks, and at the end we ran into a mini-crisis when Keyssler, the student who was the leader and had been doing most of the work, found out she couldn’t go to the competition because she had a math competition the same day. At first, this was devastating – what were we going to do?! But ultimately, it worked out for the best – when Keyssler was no longer there to do all the work, the other students had an opportunity to shine and grow in ways that I don’t think they could have with Keyssler there in the spotlight.
This group has worked so incredibly hard, meeting outside of our twice weekly meetings to keep the ball rolling, and doing a whole lot of homework … all on top of their regular schoolwork. Everything culminated last week in a Product Fair, in which the five groups (ours + the other training towns’ groups) all competed in a Shark Tank-like competition, pitching their product and answering questions from the judges. They really pulled themselves together in the final weeks, and by the day of the competition, they were a little group of professionals. It was so cute to see them all on the bus and at the competition, going through their parts of the presentation, memorizing things and practicing. In the end, we won the award for “Most Creative Product”! The kids felt good about themselves, and my group and I were so incredibly proud. It’s really a testament to how much can be accomplished in a short period of time, and also to the immense potential in each one of these students.
The other wrapping-up that took place recently was finishing up co-planning and co-teaching our classes with our counterpart teachers during training. My counterpart teacher’s name is Judith, and she’s quite nice. There’s so much more I wish I could do with her – this was training, so I was just learning to co-plan effectively, and I definitely could have done a better job challenging her and working together to make sure she truly understands the material before we taught it together. But in the end, I think we conveyed all the material more or less effectively, and in a fun and dynamic way. I hope she’ll continue to use more dynamic teaching methods once we’re gone, but honestly, I’m not holding my breath; the Nicaraguan teaching system is extremely lecture-based, and encouragement of critical thinking is scant, and I don’t think that in these three months we could really change that entrenched system. But I do hope we made the littlest difference, at least for this group of students. And we certainly learned a lot ourselves.
Seeing as this was my class session with them, at the end, I said goodbye and put my email address on the board and wished them well. To my surprise, a female student stood up and asked if she could say something. She and another student lugged up a huge cardboard box chock-full of fruit – pineapples, avocadoes, oranges, bananas, a watermelon, a cantaloupe, even a coconut – and told me that the class had held a fruit drive to collect fruit to thank me for being here. I was absolutely speechless. I don’t even know my 68 (yes, 68) students that well – because I’ve been sick so much, I’ve actually missed probably three classes, having had to switch with other Trainees and teach their sections sometimes, which means I’ve only taught the class maybe four times. And yet here they were being so incredibly generous and kind. The box weighed at least forty pounds, and two students had to help me carry it to the door of the school, where I was forced to take a moto-taxi home. I was nearly crying, I was so touched; these people have so little, and yet they are so generous. Of course, I couldn’t leave before taking zillions of photos with all of them and feeling like a celebrity. My host mom made a fruit salad with the fruit, and it was the most delicious fruit salad I’ve ever tasted, full of the love from my students. Experiences like that day make everything worth it. Everything.
Making floor cleaner to sell as the final activity for one of the entrepreneurship classes I taught. The women were encouraged by how easy it was, and are excited to launch their own small businesses!
“During my Peace Corps service, I worked primarily with organize artisans but also worked with individuals like this Moroccan yarn vendor. I took this photograph to help promote his business by showing the colors and textures of his collection.”
"Being in the Peace Corps was one of the best things I could have done to prepare for becoming an entrepreneur, especially a social entrepreneur. Successful Volunteers are, in many ways, entrepreneurs: You learn how to do a lot with few resources, how to jump into a vague situation and create change, how to recognize opportunities, and how to build something out of nothing. I learned firsthand how powerful business can be in creating social change for women."
- Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Siiri Morley, executive director of Prosperity Catalyst, who launched a program in Haiti that provides direct support, mentorship, and training to women as they start candle-making businesses
Peace Corps Volunteers Lindsay Fay, Mario Leiva, Brett Michaelson, Maureen Stickel, and Casey Weston recently coordinated the first “Young Entrepreneurs of Paraguay” workshop in Asunción, Paraguay. Thirty-nine youth from across the country attended sessions on business development, entrepreneurship, marketing and career planning. Several Paraguayan organizations donated resources for the workshop and five young Paraguayan entrepreneurs shared personal success stories during guest speaking sessions.
“We wanted to promote entrepreneurship education in a fun and dynamic way,” said Stickel, a graduate of Georgetown University who has been working as a community economic development volunteer since June 2010. “The workshop was a great way to connect like-minded youth, and it was amazing to see how much the participants grew in such a short period of time.”
