Peace Corps

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel: Barefoot MBA Lessons for Implementation in Malawi

Posted on by Jasper Yan

“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!

Independence Day Picnic in Lilongwe: Meeting Social Heroes in Malawi

Posted on by Jasper Yan

Burgers, hot dogs, beer, fireworks, and good company. These are all quintessential elements of the celebrations that mark the day that the 13 colonies declared independence from British rule. Despite being almost halfway around the world, I managed to happily integrate all of the above into my celebration of the 234th anniversary of US independence, thanks to the current US Ambassador to Malawi, Peter Bodde, who had invited Americans all over Malawi to the US Ambassador’s residence in Lilongwe.

After listening to a speech given by the Ambassador and written by President Obama (by the way, Malawians here are CRAZY about Obama: Obama gum, Obama jeans, Obama T-shirts, etc), I had a great time meeting the many American expats living here in Malawi. There were probably about a hundred that attended, and the majority of them were young, probably no older than 35, which is not surprising as there were two busloads of Peace Corps volunteers that attended.

Again, the most memorable part of this experience was definitely meeting all the amazing, passionate people who were also doing service here in Malawi. I met:

  • a nurse working at the US Embassy clinic for American diplomats in Malawi. She had been working there for 10 years, and when she found out I was Taiwanese, told us that the recent transfer of diplomatic relations from Taiwan to China had caused the departure of many Taiwanese volunteers who were doing good work in Malawi. Now, there are many Chinese companies here in Malawi employing Malawians in factories.
  • Peace Corps volunteer from Pepperdine in charge of developing pit latrines for her community. This is important as lack of proper human waste disposal are a huge public health risk for any population. In her (approximate) words, it is definitely “positively affecting people at their most sensitive moments.”
  • Peace Corp volunteers selling goods from the support groups they are serving and mentoring. It seems like the majority of the Peace Corp volunteers here are involved with microenterprise/income-generating projects. Some of the projects include selling music CDs, cloth sackey balls, and bags made of local cloths here which are so popular with tourists/volunteers here.
  • Kelly, a Peace Corps volunteer from UCSD who was one of the other few Asian Americans at the event. She was responsible for setting up HIV support groups and managing community healthcare workers.
  • Missionaries from Florida who were in charge of facilitating projects with a microfinance group called Tricord. They had so many inspiring stories about their experiences here in Malawi: they had adopted an HIV+ (now HIV-) orphan who was absolutely adorable and so lucky to have such loving parents, they had worked on projects specifically focused on women/girl empowerment such as working with mother/child prison populations who were living in absolutely squalid conditions and their children were now suffering because of the measles epidemic. We shared our frustrations with how education was so lacking here, and how that was the root of many social problems here in Malawi.
  • James & Robyn Nottingham. Robyn has recently written a book in Chitumbuka (another Malawian language) to teach small business/savings skills to the community she serves up in Northern Malawi.
  • Sam from UC Santa Cruz and his friend, both Peace Corps volunteers, who were speaking fluent Mandarin to each other. Sam had spent 2 years teaching English in Beijing and now was just starting his Peace Corps assignment here in Malawi. Sam and his friend’s Mandarin was absolutely amazing, and these are the type of people that my mom would show me and tell me that I should be ashamed at myself! He told me about that it has been a trend for Malawians to describe things “Chinese” as shoddy and low-quality. I’m not particularly offended by it, but find it quite interesting.

The one thing that I regret is not meeting more people and getting to know them better. The one thing that unifies the majority of the Americans here is their commitment to service and truly making a positive impact on their communities wherever they are, which is a common goal we all share. However, most of them will be here for the long haul (at least 2 years) to ensure the success of their projects. It’s definitely something that I would not be able to commit to, and I really applaud them for their commitment.