Entrepreneurship Week

A few weeks ago the grade 10 learners had the opportunity to participate in an entrepreneurship week at the school. It is required in the curriculum that they take part in an entrepreneurship day which is meant to give them the opportunity to practically apply what they have learned in class. I decided to organize the event to span an entire week to give the learners the chance to refine and improve their businesses. I also made it a competition where I judged them on their profit, creativity, advertising, quality, accounting, and noticeable improvements. All of the groups ultimately decided to sell different foods; not as creative as I would have liked to see, but they were successful nonetheless; they clearly know their market better than I. Feeding 250 hungry African children is not a bad gig.

Each of the 6 groups sold a variety of different foods. Some cooked traditional foods, bread, fries, meat, and others sold sweets and chips. Each group member contributed an amount of their choice that they used to buy their initial stock. After the first day most of the groups had made enough profit to go back to town and replenish their supplies.

The most interesting product; creative I guess. That’s right, those are baby birds. This group of girls actually raided a bird’s nest, took the little ones, and fried them up. To my surprise they sold out; no thanks to me though. This ended up being the winning group.

About half way through the week I decided that I would try my hand at selling to the learners. I cooked some pancakes and bread and sold some onions out of my garden. As I opened for business the learners crowded around silently not sure what to do. It was a stand-off until one brave kid decided to try a pancake. After that, I was sold out in less than two minutes. I made a decent profit which I used to buy the winning group’s prizes.

The learners sold during the 30 minute morning break. Every day it was 30 minutes of chaos. I am convinced that all the learners performed their best during this week since they were actually studying on full stomachs.

Despite the lack of creativity and product diversity (relative to my expectations only), the learners turned good profits and they had fun. I think they may have learned something also. I asked some of them what they are going to spend their profits on and many said, “Buy new clothes.”

Some of the groups improved their advertising by creating posters. The posters gave me a good laugh. My feeling is that their advertisements made promises the group never intended to keep. I am not so sure they could quickly calculate a 5% discount if the situation came up. I also managed to make a small profit from their advertising; I charged them for each sheet of paper and made them pay rent for the use of my sharpie.