On the Home Stretch
The third week of my social sabbatical
After three weeks of intense work, deep research, and many discussions, we are already approaching our finish. Our deliverables are more or less ready for presentation, only some polishing is necessary, streamlining the slides, and filling of some placeholders.
Today, we showed our current state to our clients and got good feedback. They seem to be satisfied with what we did, even if it will require a lot of work from them. After clarifying their vision and mission, we worked on their current and future offerings which we classified in short-, mid-, and long-term ones. Based on this classification we built a roadmap for the next five years. Our recommendation is they shall now start with some foundational stuff to become more attractive to potential funders and broaden their network. Furthermore, they shall continue with their STEM program for girls and work in parallel on new curriculums for a teachers program and a shorter one afternoon program. These are the short-term offerings. If they get enough funds and profits from the delivery of the trainings the second stage shall be the finalization of a STEM book and the start of a mentoring program for girls, which are the mid-term offerings. Based on the success of these offerings they can then productize their STEM kit and realize the plans for the STEM museum.
But to be successful they need money. Therefore, we created also a list of potential partners and funders and provided a template for a pitch deck. And, of course, this was the main part of the original scope of work, we (or better Liz and Robin, I couldn’t contribute much to it) give some recommendations on their communications and marketing strategy, for instance, which social media channels they shall use for which purposes to address which audiences, which stories they can tell and so on. I could also learn a lot regarding social media and marketing, it seems to be a hard work which requires much time and effort.
But live is not only work. Last weekend, while the others went to Akagera national park, I caught up on Kigali and did a shopping tour with Fabio and a hiking tour to Kanyinya hills.
Last Saturday was Umuganda in Rwanda, a day where all people must work for the community and clean their houses or their neighborhoods. That means that all shops and museums and so on where closed and nobody besides some tourists were on the street. It felt a little bit spooky to walk through the quiet and lonely city where on other days there are some many people and everything is busy. But in the afternoon the shops opened again and the typical busyness started, so that we could do our shopping tour.
The hiking tour on Sunday was very interesting. I could see other parts of Kigali which are not as clean and tidy as the city center and which correspond more to the stereotypes of life in Africa. We were a group of 6 people, three from Kigali and three from Europe. We walked almost 4 hours and had awesome views from the hill down to the valley and to Kigali on the next hills. And it was very exhausting and challenging, because it was very steep and hot and the trail was not a typical European hiking trail with signs and stairs at particularly steep places. Nevertheless, I liked it very much and would do it again. What impressed me most was that one of the other hikers carried her water bottle on her head during the whole hiking tour. And it fell down only a few times. I tried it as well, but I didn’t succeed.
