Day 14: Women's Entrepreneur Training @ Ofankor

I was so exhausted yesterday that I passed out on the bed, only to wake up at 6:30 after bumping my head on my laptop. The lights were on & so were my contacts! Felt really stupid for having the light still on - total waste of energy. :|

With all our projects running full fledged by now, you could see everyone sitting up late night sending emails to the Tourism Board or preparing content for the next day's Cyber Cafe or Women's Entrepreneur training. It was a good feeling - that we all had enough to do on our hands and that everyone was so intensely involved wanting to do as much as possible before time ran out.

I felt much the same way this morning. Olivia, Gopi & I were going to conduct our second session for the women entrepreneurs in Ofankor. They were so happy after the last session that I had a good feeling about today. Today we were going to cover very simple accounting concepts & best practices to manage money. Jen & Sarah would then conduct their health training for the same women. Meanwhile, Larry, Cindy & Yannic would go to the neighborhood school to do a session with their ICT students. Mohit, Brit & Megan would head out to Dodowa on the health center data mapping project. Click here for more details of each programs.

We hopped in the van and started for Ofankor at 8:00 am. The drive was uneventful for I'd gotten used to the countryside to Ofankor by now. Our awesome driver, Mr. Maxwell, got us to the village through 'Maxwell's secret super fast routes' by 9:00am  (yes, he's super cool!). 

Lesson Plan 

A distraction that I gave into - Felix!

We started our session by 10:15 am and almost all of attendees of the last session showed up this week. Good sign! :) We introduced 3 concepts - Income, Cost & Profit - around which we'd weaved the next 1.5 hours. Soon we got the group divided into 2 teams, they named their business and were given 20 cedis as working capital. They had to walk over to Gopi (who was loaded with fruits), buy some fruits for their store, set prices for their items & then sell it to Olivia & I. The objective was to make maximum profit with the working capital they have. As always, role plays are a big hit with these women - they just love play acting and it's fun to watch them get so deeply involved in the role. For eg. Gopi was almost knocked off his feet as the women sellers (role) surrounded him trying to persuade him buy from their store & not go to the neighboring competition!  The key takeaway for the women was that they shouldn't mix their business and personal expense. You could see that this concept was like a revelation for some of them and they had several questions on how to account if they took an item from their own store. We told them of how they should be buying from themselves & put the money back into business - they actually clapped once they learnt this concept! :)

Role play in action 

Post our session Sarah & Jen took the same group of women through health training. As always they had a ton of questions and were super interested in what Sarah & Jen was telling them. The session wrapped up at 1:30pm, we had  a quick lunch and headed back to the Google office.

The rest of the day was spent preparing for the two big events coming our way - The NGO day & the Women's Entrepreneur day. @ 6pm - we sat down with Seth to go over our last FLT session and then we were done for the day!  Yup, a long day indeed! 
The group headed back to Holi Flats and I crashed.