2 Million Micro-Entrepreneurs
Leveraging story to simulate the decisions Base of the Pyramid Entrepreneurs face daily
**This is Part 3 of a series on the Myanmar microfinance industry and the development of new and innovative Financial Education tools. Financial Literacy education has been historically weak in Myanmar, so Opportunities NOW has joined with USAID to respond to this burgeoning need.
Read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.**
What is it like to be forced to quickly make decisions that can make or break your business, with all too little information, lots of noise around you, and the pressure to feed your family today? During Global Entrepreneurship Week 2016, ONOW set out to recreate the experience for a group of 40 business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs.
Myanmar has more than 2 million micro-enterprises, and I’m willing to bet most of them don’t attend Global Entrepreneurship Week. Our event was an attempt to both experience their reality, and gain a little understanding about how best to prepare for the experience of managing a startup.
Action. Activity. Movement.
Global Entrepreneurship Week is always an important week for Opportunities NOW. But for the past couple of years we have fallen into a trap that it seems too many exciting organizations have given into: asking others to engage in entrepreneurship through listening to a panel discussion or a lecture.
#LectureMustDie
Wait, what? A lecture to learn about entrepreneurship? Is there any more striking cognitive dissonance out there? When was the last time anyone learned entrepreneurship by sitting passively in a crowd of people while one person with a microphone talked at the front of the room? That’s not entrepreneurship. That’s a waste of time.
So we went to the other extreme.
We chose a loud restaurant, we invited a bunch of people, we split them into groups. We put them through an experimental process — introducing like-able and relatable characters, pictures and backstory to set the scene, a bit of narrative to move the story forward, and a predetermined set of business scenarios— and participants stepped into the shoes of a micro-entrepreneur. We asked the groups to make decisions, assigning a point value to each decision, and set up a competition between the groups for who could do the best at micro-enterprise. We provided the groups with the story, the problem, and a few choices, and we did this round after round.
“Thanks for inviting us to such an incredible event. I was very pleased to engage in such an interactive exercise.”
— GEW event participant
What followed was one of the best events I’ve experienced in a long time. One of the fastest and most interactive hours I’ve been a part of. It was a blast. It was also eye-opening.
“That session was awesome and the techniques you are using are really impressive.” — GEW event participant
High Stakes, Limited Data
When entrepreneurs are running our businesses, we expect to have as much data as possible to make the best decision we can. We spend resources and time developing systems of data collection and building systems of analytics. But Myanmar’s 2 million micro-enterprise owners don’t have that luxury. They have little or no data to consider, little excess cash to work with, and the opportunities to grow their business (or survive the month) come and go more quickly than the time it takes get together a nifty risk assessment.
So we asked the groups to make the best decision they could with the available information, with limited time for group processing. Groups constantly asked for more information, but we wouldn’t provide it, because micro-entrepreneurs almost never get complete info either.
“The scenarios are based on real-life. They are common scenarios that an entrepreneur in Myanmar is likely to face.” — GEW event participant
It was almost fun to watch their growing frustration with the limited available data.
Experiential, Interactive Learning
At the end, we reflected on how this activity was a great way to educate — real world experience, simulations, role play — these are the experiences that drive the point home, and stick in our brains. Discussion and group processing help us develop our critical thinking skills and see all the possible paths down which our decisions could lead us. This is the way to teach entrepreneurship — bring the real world into the classroom.
That’s the model we’ve settled on for our Entrepreneurship program at ONOW, and the results have been exciting. We’ve just had our biggest year of startup launches ever — more this year than in any of the previous 4 years combined. Armed with real world experience gained in a controlled classroom setting, young women at the base of the pyramid gain a renewed confidence in their ability to launch, and succeed in a new business.
Maybe some of those GEW event attendees will give it a shot as well.
For more pictures of the event, check out this Facebook album. The story content and illustrations used in the GEW event were part of an early-stage prototype of a financial education mobile application being developed in partnership with USAID and EOS Group Myanmar, a social enterprise working alongside and supporting both organizations and local initiatives with focus on Financial Inclusion, Skills Development and Risk Management.
