Education mode

This morning I ran an hour-long seminar for Youth Business Malawi (YBM) clients on the importance of knowing your customers. Sadly there weren't many of them there (around 8-9), but they seemed to find it quite interesting, although getting them to interact was a bit like blood from a stone at first, but eventually they opened up.

There were two guys there who ran a clothing and textile design business, and they were wearing some examples of their products, which looked really good, so I've got their address and will be visiting them to see if I can pick up a nice item or two for David back home. They are also musicians, and so I've promised to pick up a copy of their CD to take home with me.

Then this afternoon, I ran a tutorial for the whole team on how to develop a basic website on Blogger. This was in response to interest generated when we did a proposal for the Government's Business Growth Scheme (BUGS) to design a template and instruction "manual" that Malawi small businesses could use to get an online presence without paying 30k-40k kwacha to web design companies (a complete rip-off).

The feedback on the tutorial was pretty good. They've all now got to get their own sites designed, built and up and running by Friday morning, when I'll judge the winner and award a prize (although what the prize will be, God alone knows).