Project scoping
By Charles
It brings me a lot of personal satisfaction to finally be writing my first blog post for Professor Flammer’s Social Impact Field Seminar course. I began my journey at Questrom as a full-time Social Impact MBA during the fall of 2018. I was thrilled to enroll in the 2019 Social Impact Seminar course, which was going to Johannesburg, South Africa. Unfortunately, in early 2019 I suffered a back injury training for a race and had to take over a year off from school. Although 2021 looks quite different than 2019 my personal excitement is still the same.
During our kickoff meeting I was delighted to find out I would be working with a business incubator out of Burkina Faso. I have experience working with business incubators and have a passion for helping entrepreneurs so consulting for our client seemed like a natural fit. My colleague shared and continues to share the same excitement for this project, and I feel very fortunate to work alongside her.
Our client contact has a background in consulting and was a Humphrey fellow at Boston University. Even though the main language in Burkina Faso is French he speaks English and we have not run into communication issues. Burkina Faso is a small country in Western Africa which has a relatively weak economy – $1USD = 500 CFA (Burkina Faso currency). Eight countries in Burkina Faso use that currency with the central bank being in Senegal. According to our contact there is a severe education and skills gap in Burkina Faso. Most individuals end up working for the government. Our client started to help underserved populations like younger individuals and women to be introduced to entrepreneurship. Our client also acts as a screener to help individuals determine if they are ready to turn their ideas into actual businesses or if it is just an idea. The business incubator started from a 1.2 million dollar contract and is looking to build out its programs.
It has been such a privilege working with our client contact who is extremely engaged and excited to be working with us.
Already a high note has been him talking to us on facetime as he went into his children’s elementary school to pick them up. We got to say hi to his children and their teacher! It is truly incredible how technology has made this experience so interactive.
My colleague and I have just moved past the discovery phase of the work and are now getting into the meat of our project deliverables.
The first thing we did was to narrow the scope of work and set realistic expectations. At first there were a myriad of issues that our client wanted us to help solve, but we were able to home in on a more formal recruitment process for entrepreneurs and also mentors.
Additionally, we are going to do market research to help the business incubator attract impact investors to its pool of entrepreneurs. We have already had multiple conversations with our client but also individuals from other organizations who have offered to give us their advice. One thing that we discovered is that before we offer these solutions we looked past the actual organizational structure of the business incubator. Our client organization is a very lean organization and our client contact does most of the work himself. One thing my colleague and I have discovered is that we need to ensure our client understands that the business incubator also needs to build out its structure and organizational capacity before we stretch the operation too thin. In the coming weeks we are working on creating what we think is the value proposition for the business incubator, its logic model and theory of change model. Our hypothesis is that these tools will help our client in the long run as he tries to build out a sustainable organizational structure for the business incubator. We are also beginning to construct a more built out recruiting and data management tool and a funding map of western Africa. More to come soon!