CAPs Friday 4/9/09

The dream turned into a reality: entrepreneurship project in Tanzania

By Julius James Shirima

It was 10 pm in late December 2008 when I was lying on the bed in the holiday camp in South Africa, when the idea of initiating DARECHA 2009 started. It came to my mind as an impossible dream but I promised myself to bring it into reality one day. It took me almost 4 months to express this idea publicly since I was trying to shape it by myself. I shared it with my fellow team members (5 Tanzanian students at African Leadership Academy). They were very impressed! They committed themselves to help me accomplish this dream.

The Dar Es Salaam Young Entrepreneurial Challenge “DARECHA” is a project that envisions inspiring an entrepreneurial outlook among Tanzanian Youth by challenging them to tackle root causes of problems with an entrepreneurial mindset and create sustainable solutions. This is being done through a business ideas competition among youths aged 16-25 in streets “petty businesses’’, high schools and universities. Twenty finalists are chosen to attend one week of entrepreneurship training but ten of them present their ideas. The top three winners for 2009 were awarded with a total of 500 GBP/Sterling as an incentive for further development of their ideas.

DARECHA seeks to provide youths with a platform to reflect upon, develop and express their ideas, and get exposure to potential funding, so that they may create value and grow to be successful entrepreneurs. By so doing, youths meet needs in their societies. I believe in ideas of young people, and believe with right networking, exposure, education and guidance they can develop their ideas and create a great, long lasting contribution to the society.

In this project I worked as a director whereby I designed the project proposal (budget, timeline) and invited team members. I also coordinated and directed the team (10 members plus hundreds of volunteers), fundraised and look for supporters such as sponsors, donors and advisors. Moreover, I framed and designed the budget for DARECHA and facilitated its implementation, held interviews in the media and facilitated meetings within the team and with national leaders. I designed and directed the updating of the DARECHA website. I also directed the analysis of DARECHA application forms. In addition to that, I prepared and signed agreements with donors and DARECHA winners. I wrote recommendations for team members and DARECHA finalists and finally prepared and sent updates of DARECHA to donors, supporters and media.

Throughout the project I faced several challenges that I had no way of escaping them but faced and solved them. For instance the biggest challenge was trust building in everyone since this project was something new to youths and donors in Tanzania. Therefore it was hard to motivate the youths to participate and donors to sponsor the project. But I did not quit. As the director, I went to different organizations and companies to request for fund and explained to them how the project was going to be successful. Most of them could not trust me therefore I decided to encourage the team members to use our own money to run the project until when the British council –Global Changemakers believed in the idea and supported  us financially and materially.

 

DARECHA team members in a meeting under a tree since they didn’t have their own office

 

Other challenges were bureaucracy and corruption in offices. We also depended on public transport which in some circumstances delayed my appointments with potential donors or sponsors. Considering that we were supported financially by the Global Changemakers alone, we were forced to work under a very limited budget. Furthermore, DARECHA lacked its own office which forced me to convince the team members to hold our meetings in restaurants and under trees. For this reason the restaurant owner sometimes chased us away since we couldn’t buy drinks or bites.

But we finally completed the project successfully. Our finalists went through one week of entrepreneurship training and we received positive feedback from all participants (finalists and invited guests in the final event).

 

DARECHA 2009 finalists in the entrepreneurship training week at British council hall

 

In this project I learnt that it is very tricky to take the writings on the proposal paper into implementation; in fact it needs courage especially when you have few networks on ground. I also learnt that passion needs persistence since challenges will always be there and a good entrepreneur will always find a way to overcome them.

 

DARECHA winners with their certificates, judges and guest of honour from ministry of work, employment and youth’s development