Guestpost: Business Models, Entrepreneurship, and Poverty Alleviation in Kenya

Blog: Business Model Alchimist

This guestpost tells the special story of how Sebastián Salinas Claro and Joshua Bicknel connected across the globe on the Business Model Hub. They joined efforts in their aim to defeat poverty by teaching entrepreneurship. The results are amazing.

By Sebastián Salinas Claro (with Douglas Cochrane and Joshua Bicknell):
My recent journey illustrates the power of social networks and how linkedin and the Business Model Hub brought me to Kenya – all the way from Chile. It was a fascinating experience that all started when I contacted Alex on Linkedin. I told him how I was teaching the Business Model Canvas to disadvantaged youth in the South of Chile with excellent results. He suggested that I post my story on Business Model Hub, which I did. That’s where the journey starts.

In August Joshua Bicknel browsed the pages of the Business Model Hub and came across my post. He read about the exciting experience I went through introducing the Canvas in Chile. He decided to contact me, keen to hear more. After a few hours on Skype, I declared my intention to travel to Kenya to work with him on a pilot project. It was quite a commitment from me. Few Chileans travel to Kenya, and it was an even bigger leap considering we had never met. But I took the leap and joined his team in Nakuru, East Africas fastest growing City, in October 2011.

Since then we have been working with unemployed youth supporting them to imagine and design innovative new businesses that create employment and defeat poverty. I want to use this blogpost to discuss some of the insights from this experience, in particular the power of the Canvas as a great leveler. We worked with 4th year Commerce students from Egerton University and unemployed young men and women who never finished high school. Both grasped the Canvas equally fast and applied it to imagine impressive new businesses. In fact, on a number of occasions the non-university students actually impressed us more.

One such occasion was in a session with the Salgaa Sparks youth group. In Salgaa there is no rubbish collection. All waste is either dumped on the streets or burnt. It is a fast growing town and a popular nightspot for transit truckers, so the area is becoming increasingly dirty and unsanitary. Sparks came to us seeking help to develop a solution to this problem. Initially, they didn’t imagine starting a business, instead believing the solution to be a volunteer community-cleaning programme. By using the Business Model Canvas we helped them discover a more interesting opportunity altogether.

Firstly, they mapped their idea on the canvas, imagining it as a profitable business, and came up with a rubbish collection scheme. Not a wholly radical idea. A similar schemes exist in other Kenyan settlements. However, they then began to question whether there was any value in the collected waste and soon realized that they could turn the organic materials into fertilizer and sell it to the farmers at $10 a bag. Then they came up with another profitable idea: to rent out their work carts on days when they were not collecting rubbish.

Using the canvas they envisioned, imagined, developed, and refined a very exciting business model with three potential revenue streams. A business that achieves two goals at a time. It cleans-up the environment and provides unskilled youth with jobs. They are currently applying to the Kenyan Youth Enterprise Fund and project that their business will break even in its second month!

Throughout their lives these youth have been excluded because of their social and economic background. By using the Canvas they have, with no formal business training and sometimes not even a high school diploma, produced a very attractive business proposal. This speaks volumes for the capacity of the Canvas as a tool for profound change, empowering communities to start businesses that tackle the current structures of inequality.

We are excited to expand this programme next year. We will take graduates to both Kenya and Chile to work with hundreds of unemployed youth to develop new businesses as we seek to build a global generation of young people with a commitment to defeating poverty through entrepreneurship and not aid. And everywhere we go we will pack the Canvas as the key tool in our arsenal!