“Don’t reinvent the wheel.”

During this internship, we were placed with the task of reinforcing small-business skills in both community healthcare workers and HIV support groups. Just a couple days ago, I was tearing my hair out trying to reorganize and revamp our lessons on basic business concepts. For some reason, the organization and structure of the lessons just didn’t make sense to me, and it was so incredibly frustrating.

In hopes of getting inspiration for our lessons, I turned towards the incredible set of lesson plans by Barefoot MBA, an open-source project started by two students from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. As I read the Authors’ Notes from the curriculum they had developed for rural India, I became so excited to see that they shared the same teaching goals, constraints, and expectations that we also face here with our target population in Malawi:

“Our sources consistently emphasized the need for just-in-time learning: teaching only skills and concepts so fundamental to the fabric of our subjects’ immediate needs that they perceive no choice but to learn them. Understanding what those immediate needs are has been a daunting task. Though we have listed lessons in an order that makes sense for many, we intentionally have kept them short, allowing the local adapters to select and prioritize relevant lessons and to determine the timing of lesson delivery as circumstances dictate. For example, a village might teach a set of three lessons over one three-hour session on a weekend or over three one-hour sessions on weekday evenings.” – Barefoot MBA

We showed these Barefoot MBA lessons to Casey Nesbit, who definitely has a much better understanding of education techniques and Malawian learning styles than we do. She remarked that the Barefoot MBA lessons were perfect for our audience; these lessons provided simple stories to illustrate the core concepts of each lesson, and follow-up questions ranging from simple comprehension to full-on discussion and application. To put it simply: the Barefoot MBA lessons were written by people that had done a tremendous amount of research in developing appropriate educational material to teach entrepreneurship in low-resource settings like ours. It is comprehensive as it covers 15 topics, which may be chosen and reordered based on what the target audience already knows.

The constraints that we are facing make implementation and adaptation of Barefoot MBA ideal:

1. Despite the fact that we had conducted field research visiting the various HIV support groups, we still do not fully understand how much our students do and do not know. The flexibility and comprehensiveness of Barefoot MBA allows our HIV support group liaison (Angela) and community healthcare volunteer liaison (Alexander) to select the appropriate lessons based on their experiences with both groups.
2. Although we know that our students will have a primary-education background, we’re not exactly sure what that entails. The follow-up questions that Barefoot MBA has after each story demonstrating a concept gradually increase in difficulty, and this ensures that we can cater to the learning ability of all of our students.
3. It is a burden for HIV support group members and community healthcare volunteers to travel long distances to attend trainings at the hospital. Therefore, we are limited to 2 sessions that are 3 hours each. The flexibility and simplicity of each Barefoot MBA lesson allows it to easily stand on its own or in combinations. For example, if community healthcare volunteers need to come for a medical-related training at the hospital, a Barefoot MBA lesson could also be easily and quickly implemented at the end of the training.

During our first training session, we will implement Barefoot MBA lessons to teach and reinforce basic business principles. These Barefoot MBA lessons will be translated into Chichewa and are completely adapted to Malawi. Therefore, these adapted Barefoot MBA lessons could potentially be taught by anyone here in Malawi, and they don’t even need to know English! I know that a great majority of the Peace Corp volunteers here in Malawi are also working on teaching entrepreneurship skills, and hopefully this will be helpful to them, as well. During our second training session, we will be focusing on implementation of basic business principles, mainly by teaching them how to develop action plans, budgets, and accounting/cash-flow ledgers.

I am so excited that our microenterprise program is finally coming together, and that what we develop now can hopefully be of use to other volunteers here in Malawi. Once we are done with the translations, our first round of teaching these lessons, and final revisions, we hope to make our microenterprise program for Malawian settings available to everyone. After all, what’s the use in “reinventing the wheel,” when we’ve already put this much time into it already!