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.