In training mode

Thursday, and the rest of the team is beavering away on the seminar for the hospitality sector, visiting potential venues, and calling up prospective attendees to encourage them to sign up.

Corporate Social Responsibility

I, on the other hand, spent the day largely working on putting the final touches to the piece of training I'm doing for the junior consultants on Friday.  The subject is Corporate Social Responsibility, which I'm very much in favour of.  I'm quite pleased with both the structure and content of the lecture/seminar/workshop (I'm not revealing how it's going to work until the day itself).  Whilst CSR isn't part of the core curriculum of the Chartered Management Institute qualification that they are studying for, it does bring together several aspects from the core elements that they have already completed, so it will be interesting to see how much of the training and experience they have already had they can bring to bear on Friday.

Oh No!!!

Disaster, sort of.  Late last night I started to feel a bit unwell, which in turn developed into stomach cramps in the small hours.  The upshot was that I didn't get much sleep, and felt decidedly dodgy this morning.  I've no idea what brought this on - I'd assume it must have been something I ate, but I didn't have anything that other people didn't eat, so it's a bit of a mystery.  Suffice to say that I thought it better to stay at home rather than risk infecting the entire office, so I sat at the computer table all morning.

By lunchtime I was feeling a bit better and so decided to risk it and take a stroll into town for some fresh air.  Thankfully there were no problems, and I returned safely to the house to get back to the computer.  By the time the two girls got back, I was well on the mend, courtesy of my travelling medicine cabinet.

One thing I did get done was to set up the tutorial I've been asked to give the team on building a basic website using an application like Blogger.  With the relatively high price of computers and internet access here, the internet is an underused resource for Malawi business.  There's an organisation here called BUGS (Business Growth Scheme) which sits within the Ministry of Industry and Finance.  It is a fund that refunds 50% of consultancy fees to approved projects, and many of our clients make use of it.  The idea is to accelerate the  take-up of capacity-building consultancy services by Malawi companies.  I met with the manager of BUGS in Blantyre a couple of weeks ago, and he mentioned the prices being demanded for basic static website development.  His concern is that BUGS then is asked to pay 50% of a relatively inflated sum.  So I suggested that we could develop a template for Blogger or Wordpress that would in principle give these small companies a route to a free or low-cost web presence.  The proposal was well received, but alas we couldn't go ahead due to issues related to existing contractual relationships.  A shame, but I'm sure the opportunity will come up again.

In any event, all this web-related stuff prompted the junior consultants in the office to ask me to give them some training in how to build a basic website.  So I took advantage of my day in the house to develop a structure, which will be based on a 90 minute walk-through of Blogger, together with some key pointers that they will need to be aware of (e.g. copyright, usability, focusing on the target audience, etc.), after which they'll be asked to go away and build a Blogger site, using one of their client companies as the "customer" for the site.  I'm really looking forward to seeing how they get on.  When their mini projects are complete, I'll post links on this blog.

It's still the weather.....

Last night it got cold.

And this Friday morning it still is.  Grey and damp, I gave up the battle and wore my fleece into work.  The internet is now sorted, but alas the water isn't.  So it's crossed legs until lunchtime.

We try to have no client meetings on Fridays so that the focus moves to training for the apprentices.  The consultants also have a review and team meeting with the apprentices to review the past week and flag up any issues going forward.  Of course, with Rick having left, and Sharife on the plane heading for Jo'burg, it was just me.  They'd asked for some help with getting to grips with what marketing is all about, so I decided to have an interactive session to start with so that I could answer any specific questions they had and then I'd be able to plan out what I could do over the next couple of months.  It seemed to go quite well, and so I'll try to do 30 mins each Friday to build up their knowledge and expertise.

One thing I did do was develop a spreadsheet to log useful online resources for each of the core and non-core CMI training modules (plus marketing) which can be developed over time to provide a helpful directory of websites and online reference materials.  The apprentices really liked the idea.

The office closes at lunchtime on Fridays (it's something that NGOs tend to do here, but drives Peter mad because it means we aren't formally working the hours we are contracted to do - despite the work we do back at the house in the evenings!).  So apparently there's a new policy whereby the UK consultants will be working Friday afternoons in the office, but it will be focusing on developing new training modules, etc.

We needed to get some shopping in for the house, so we went to the Chichiri shopping mall (well, the shopping mall in Blantyre) to buy stuff and have a bite to eat.  We ended up in a curry house - I had a very nice chicken aloo with a naan, Then to the Shoprite supermarket for the shopping - I indulged myself with a bar of Dairy Milk and some fruit for my room.

We we due to have a Skype call with Edinburgh at 4pm but the call never came, so we emailed to say we were going home and they could contact us there later if they wanted (this is to do with a large project that might be coming up).  So then back to the house, and get online.  The Skype call eventually took place at around 7.30pm.

The plan was to go to a local bar to watch the England game.  This bar (Mustang Sally's) is an amazing place.  It's owned by a guy from Manchester who's been out here for years.  He bears more than a passing resemblance to Roy Orbison - when we got there he was sitting at the side of the bar dressed completed in black, wearing sunglasses.  The place is designed like some sort of tropical island, with bamboo lining the path from the car park, and there's an upstairs area where they have discos, but there is also a large kidney-shaped swimming pool in the middle of the floor!  I'll get pictures later on.  In the meantime the match was rubbish, but we met up with some of the expats who'd come round to the house a few days ago, and so had a good chat with them, before hitting the road around midnight.