Alleviating Poverty through Basic Business Skills

Background and Survey Results

Recently we have been blessed with very encouraging confirmation of the effectiveness of our work (and your work) in equipping people with basic business skills through Workbook 1 training. In short, over 60% of those who attend Workbook 1 training either without a business, or with a failing business, have a successful business within one year (see picture below). For a summary of the facts and background, please read on.

Initial training was conducted over four days in a visit to Kampala in October 2006. Subsequent to this, some of that group (25 out of 40) were trained as trainers of the material in February 2007.

Volunteer trainers were paid only travel expenses, but were keen to use the training they had received to benefit others – we were just keen to ensure they were not out of pocket. Trainers trained others in local church buildings for about half a day a week for about a month at a time.

Over the ensuing year, 400 people were trained through the workbook, and at the end of the year, a random sample of 33 of these (all of whom had attended the training over 9 months previously) were surveyed in terms of the impact the training had had on their circumstances. They were asked their situation prior to training, and their situation at the time of the survey, and the results are shown graphically below (‘successful’ in this case refers to sufficient sustainable income to feed, house and educate their families, which is equivalent to a minimum of £1000 pa in the area around Kampala)

If the figures are representative of the 400 people trained, which we believe they are, then we can conclude:

• 69% of those who came on the training who had no business at all appear to be running a successful business within one year
• 66% of those running a failing business appear to have turned that business around within one year of the training
• 200 ‘new’ people now have a successful business as a direct result of the training (264 successful businesses in all) which at £1000+pa over 10 years equates to £2M+ of benefit – but this is conservative because we know anecdotally that some are already employing people in their businesses

People continue to be trained out of the scheme at a rate of 30-40 per month, and this is likely to be sustained locally and to grow without any further intervention from us

The total cost of the scheme ‘itself’ (ignoring the one-off costs of researching and developing the materials in the first place) to date is two weeks of a UK trainer’s time and two return flights, and a further £4000 in printing the materials locally and in covering local expenses