OSCAR MWILA

It was a real pleasure to meet and talk to Oscar Mwila recently. Oscar has worked for a Christian organisation called Operation Mobilization (OM) for around 14 years now helping individuals and small groups of people to set up businesses and giving them training to help them succeed and run profitable businesses.

Oscar talked about his experience, first of all in the mining industry when he first left education and then having his own small businesses when the mines became privatised. His business interests back then were involved with fishing. He didn’t actually fish but imported the “tilley lamps” that the fishermen used to attract the Kapenta at night on the lakes. He also bought the fish caught and sold it on to further markets.

Oscar is now 43, married to Christine, a secondary school teacher and they have 3 lovely children. Priscilla is 8 years old and Catherine, 6. Both of the older children go to school in Ndeke, an area of Ndola. Their youngest child is Oscar Junior who is just 2.

The whole family believe very much in Christian values and with this in mind Oscar started working with OM and a missionary empowering local people to understand business and to start their own. He was a missionary for 5 years in Malawi then for a further year in Zanzibar before returning to The Copperbelt and setting up home in Ndola.

Oscar and his family outside his new house that is being constructed

He now helps clients learn about

• Business Identification
• Business Assessment – Viability and Profitability
• Business Plans – Accounting, Spreadsheets and Cash Flow 

during his Business Training session.

Oscar has been working with Beyond Ourselves to help several people including some from Kawama to set up diverse businesses such as buying and selling clothes and breeding, growing on and selling chickens. In August and the following months he will be working with several people at Janna to train them in the business side of running and operating a small bakery. This will involve stock purchasing and rotation and stock taking. He will also be working with them to understand profit and loss (hopefully not too much of the loss though). It is not just with Beyond Ourselves he carries out this work but with many of the local communities in this area.

Explaining business methods to a small group at Janna School

When asked about his interests, Oscar very quickly replied his main interest is watching his protégés businesses prosper and grow with ongoing training. He really enjoys transforming people’s lives and helping to bridge the unemployment gap.

When not working with others he still carries on several small business opportunities himself with a brick/block making company as well as a small farming interest where last year he grew soya beans and has replaced them in the dry season with over 4000 head of cabbage that he sells locally along with free range chickens.

Oscar took Jan and I out along with his wife and children to show us his new home he is having built in Ndola. They are all looking forward to moving there as soon as they can.

Thank you to Oscar and the whole family for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk to us.

The Term Ahead…

The Beyond Ourselves team here in Zambia are looking forward to a full and exciting term ahead. 

This term we will be focussing on our roles and responsibilities as a charity, as well as the Community Schools’ roles and responsibilities and how our relationship will develop. Many of our tasks and activities here stay the same but the longer we work together in partnership with the local communities the more we learn about what we can change and what is working well.

The Zambian government have recently produced some guidelines detailing exactly what schools, leaders and their supporting charity’s responsibilities are. This has been really helpful and so this Friday we will be meeting with our partner schools’ Senior Leadership Teams to go through these guidelines.

We see a large part of our role here as promoting sustainability in continuous education development. On Monday we are hosting a “Waste to Toys” workshop. This will be run by a South African organisation who are passionate about using local resources and waste materials to make toys and school resources. We have had the opportunity to offer this workshop to other charities and community schools in our area and are hoping to have 12 different schools and organisations represented on the day.

During October we play host to Cranleigh school 6th form team and then an ‘Admin team’. Both teams will help us to interview and collect information on all the children registered in our schools. We use this data - changes in health and weight etc. - to inform us of the benefits of the feeding programme and where there are additional needs.

In Zambia, Grade 7 is the last year of primary education and so the children will be taking their final exams in November. This term for them means plenty of extra work and hard revision. Passing means a chance to attend a secondary school and passing with a good result means a better choice of secondary school.

The 5th December marks the end of term and the start of the ‘Summer holidays’ for our schools. The Beyond Ourselves team will then start to look ahead to the new school year.

Keep posted for more detailed posts of our upcoming events…

Mama Mimi’s

At Beyond Ourselves we believe that to see people truly released from poverty there needs to be an investment in business and social enterprise. Our hope is that as these are set up in each school community they will provide the skills training, employment and finance that can not only help sustain our partner schools in the future but also contribute to wider community transformation.

So, as part of our exploration in this area, earlier this summer we were delighted to welcome a team from Mama Mimi’s, South Africa. Mama Mimi’s is a fantastic enterprise developing micro-franchise bakeries. Ross and Richman joined us in Ndola for a few days to demonstrate not only how their oven works, but how their business model operates and the impact it can have on a community.

We gathered some of our team and some key local people to be trained by Ross and Richman. Together we discussed the best recipes, crunched the numbers and checked the feasibility of running a pilot bakery at one of our schools. Oh, and we ate a LOT of bread!

It was clear to us that these bakeries successfully help to create an entrepreneurial mindset in the individual bakers. But more than this, as the baker will often spend their profits in their community it benefits the community as a whole. This ‘multiplier effect’ is the silver bullet needed for economic change.

Ross tells this story to explain the effect:

“Roughly it works like this. I have a gardener that I pay R100 cash to for his day’s work. On his way home he can now buy a pair of shoes from a township cobbler. On his way home the cobbler has his hair done in a container hairdresser using the R100. The hairdresser then buys two cooked chickens on the street on her way home with the R100. It’s all the same R100 but it had a multiplier effect of four, or the equivalent of R400.

If the gardener didn't get the work and the R100, none of the others would have benefited. In a South African Township the scenario looks like this: a baker makes R150 profit per day, 25 loaves of bread were bought by customers at R2 cheaper than a competitive loaf. This creates another saving to the community of R50, added together it equals R200. This R200 now gets spent within the community four times = R800 per day or R20,000 per month.

What if we had 20,000 bakers?

This all means that there now can be more hairdressers, cobblers and people cooking meat on the street...”

The success of Mama Mimi’s is not only in the profit that the individual bakers make, but in the long term effect it has on the entire community. We are excited to be exploring this model by having a pilot bakery starting at Janna School this term. The bakers involved have just this week completed a business course in preparation for their new venture. We are thrilled to be offering this opportunity to local people in the communities we partner with in Zambia.

Huge thanks to Cranleigh School for raising the funds to run this pilot and, if successful, to roll it out on a wider scale within the communities we work in.

Hellen B Muleya

Hellen

Today we feature Hellen Muleya from Chimwemwe in Kitwe. Hellen lives at Greater Joy School along with the rest of her talented and hard working family. Her husband, Victor, is an architect and has designed many projects locally including the new proposed ablution block and kitchen area at the school as well as their new house just outside the grounds of Greater Joy School that they are all hoping to move into soon. Victor preaches in the church on site and the whole family have a strong belief in the Christian ethos. They have four children, Natasha, 18, who has finished school and is hoping to go on to university to study to be a Doctor. Victor Junior is 16, and is a really talented musician who plays many instruments including drums, keyboard and bass guitar in the church each week. He is hoping to go on to be a professional musician when he finishes school. His brother, Angel, 11 is also a musician who plays and sings in the church but he has high hopes of being a Lawyer. Angel is in Grade 7 at Greater Joy. The youngest member of the family is Grace, aged 8 and also at Greater Joy in Grade 3. Although still young and loves playing with her dolls, she has said she wants to be a nurse.

Hellen with her youngest children, Grace and Angel

Hellen is an exceptional dressmaker and Tailor and has opened a small shop in Chimwemwe where she grew up and where her Mother still lives. She was taught sewing at school so alongside the clothes that she makes to order and sell she also makes very bright and colourful clothes for the Praise Team at her Church and for the choir of which she is a member.

Finishing a brightly coloured jacket for the praise team at church

Because of this she was asked if she could make the uniforms for the children at Greater Joy School some six years ago when the school opened. Her busiest time for the school uniforms is November and December so that all the new children who arrive at the start of the new school year in January have a uniform to wear. Obviously uniforms wear out or are outgrown so some are made all year. Hellen goes to the material shops or the markets in Chimwemwe and Kitwe to buy her materials of which Beyond Ourselves pay for the materials for Greater Joy school. Each metre length for a shirt is K12.50 and for the trousers K15.00. With the extra money from Beyond Ourselves she has managed to buy a few extra “fittings” for the new house.   

Measuring and trying on the uniforms at school

Besides all the sewing, Hellen also looks after her home, cooks meals for the family and ensures that all is kept clean. On top of this both parents act as caretakers for the church so I would like to thank Hellen for taking some time out of her very busy day to talk to me about herself and this wonderful family.