Working in Rwanda
The first ten days of my Social Sabbatical
We are now in the second week of our assignment. The past one and a half weeks were full of impressions, information, and discussions. We met our clients Ariane and Alice every day and tried to understand what they are doing and how they are doing it. Furthermore, we wanted to understand in which context they do their business and with whom they collaborate. We also researched their competitors and tried to identify potential partners and funders who could help to make their business more sustainable.
We also used design thinking methods to formulate their vision and mission, because it turned out that they don’t need only help with marketing and PR but that many basic things of their business model are not very well defined. Nevertheless, we have been making good progress. We now have clear vision and mission statements and identified some key differentiators with them because we saw that there are a lot of other players in the experiential STEM learning space in Rwanda, in which they work, which makes it necessary to find other differentiators. Here we had surprisingly intense discussions about the differentiator “girls”. We (the SAP team) thought it’s an obvious thing however the Starlight ladies felt that this would limit their potential reach. It was a difficult decision but now they decided to add the “girls” to their key differentiators with the hope that they can attract more funders and partners with it. They actually are partnering with Career Girls, an US-based organization which presents female role models for a huge set of career paths and helps the girls to find their career. They worked together to enrich the STEM workshop with the careers and life skills content.
As next steps we want to focus on their current and potential future offerings and would like to understand how we can make a working business model for them. I expect interesting discussions again. But overall I’m glad that we found a good collaboration model between Starlight and the SAP team and could finish the first steps on our road through our Social Sabbatical. Although we all are no real experts on this business stuff, I think, we do a good job in helping them clarifying what they can offer and how they can do it.
Since our clients don’t have their own office we explored this week several alternatives to the Genocide Memorial. One day we worked at Question Cafe, another at Norrsken House Kigali, a coworking space in which Starlight booked a meeting room for us and where they typically have their desks as well. Today we are at ShokolaCafe, which is in the Public Library of Kigali. During we were working there a Korean song festival was taking place, which was really funny. Several Rwandan singers sang Korean songs, which is something I not expected to see here.
But a Social Sabbatical is not only work. We also the explore the night life of Kigali after our working days, we celebrated Diwali with our Indian colleague Ruti, and did Karaoke with Edmar on the occasion of his birthday. We are a great team with many awesome colleagues and it’s a lot of fun to be with them at Kigali.
