Ray LiuJournal #1
I’ve finished two weeks of work with Gawad Kalinga (GK), a community development NGO in the Philippines, and it’s been an amazing experience so far!
I’m still getting used to some of the cultural adjustments here—like eating meals with a fork and spoon (as is customary in most of Southeast Asia), but I’m loving my time here and especially the work with which I’ve been involved.
Originally, I thought the main focus of my summer would be to study successful businesses in various GK villages and help analyze and develop case studies for a “Manual for Effective Enterprise Development”—but my responsibilities have become more than that.
Specifically, I’ll be able to observe the before, during and after stages of successful microenterprise development, by:
- Helping profile different GK villages, in order to uncover different skills and resources that exist within communities and find new opportunities for small businesses.
- Finding ways for a new t-shirt printing business in one of the villages scale its operations.
- And I’ll still be doing what I originally planned—studying Rags2Riches—a small business that hires villagers in Payatas and has quickly become profitable (http://rags2riches.ph/).
All of these short-term projects will eventually culminate in my helping craft a first-run version of the Manual and also serve as a consultant for students enrolled in a Strategic Management course at Ateneo de Manila’s School of Management towards the end of my stay here*.
My first day of work included an orientation with my classmate, Cheryl Gladstone. In addition to watching videos and receiving more background info on GK, we learned how to take the jeepneys and trains, walk through two different malls and then ride a tricycle (aka tut-tut in Thailand, rickshaw in India) to work.
Since then, I have visited several GK communities, helped with a build for a new village just north of metro Manila (which turned into a very muddy weekend as the rainy season approaches) and conducted a focus group in order to complete a training needs analysis for the villagers helping with the t-shirt printing business.
Tomorrow is my birthday and I’m extremely excited about what this new year of my life and the next few weeks will bring!
*Ateneo de Manila is one of the most competitive universities in the Philippines, making it an excellent learning environment for foreign students doing their summer internships in this country. GK has a very strong partnership with the university, and the Ateneo branch of GK actually pioneers a number of initiatives.
Journal #2
The middle few weeks of my internship with Gawad Kalinga have been just as productive as my first few weeks. I’m still loving the work!
Cheryl and her partner took me out for a great birthday dinner and got me a book from the Ateneo de Manila University Press about “Leading Philippine Organizations in a Changing World.” It’s really an excellent read!
My projects have also been moving along fairly nicely…
We conducted our productivity profile among the eight GK villages and things turned out much differently than I expected. First, we did a one-day whirlwind tour of the eight villages to inform them of our impending survey and ask that they gather as many community members as possible in a central location when we returned. While visiting, we uncovered several new businesses that the communities started—a candle & detergent-making business started by several nuns and home-grown figurine/statuette-making business!
The next day, with a larger group of GK workers and volunteers, we split up into smaller teams and returned to the villages to conduct our survey. However, the turnout in each place was so huge that we ended up just giving out our questionnaires for people to fill out on their own (instead of doing individual interviews, which was what I had originally envisioned). We even ran out of forms mid-way and needed to drop by a print shop to make more copies!
A number of issues arose with people’s responses (e.g. misinterpreting the questions, skipping sections of the form, etc.) and I was sure to suggest a debriefing session among the survey administrators, so that we could clean up the questionnaires for the next time GK did this. We ended up having a very engaging and lively discussion about improving the study and I was glad that my previous experience in marketing research consulting at the Nielsen Company helped me bring forth some additional insights. As we coded respondents’ answers, we found some more areas for improvement and have since compiled a collection of best practices for questionnaire development.
Most recently, I met with some honor students at Ateneo’s School of Management who are running a statistics club and gave them some ideas for how to analyze and check the data we’ve tabulated. Among my suggestions were techniques that I had used in my previous job and that were also covered in the Managerial Statistics class at CBS—including correlations, cross-tabulations, statistical significance tests and regression. These students will complete their analysis after I am done with my internship and I’m very excited to follow up and learn about their findings after I am back in the states.
Helping the t-shirt business scale up its operations has actually been a very challenging (but also rewarding) task, as the enterprise began almost randomly.
Basically, there was a GK rally last summer and some employees had the idea for the GK villages to produce the shirts. Luckily, someone very involved with GK had connections with a professional t-shirt business and was able to impart some of his knowledge onto the villagers in order to help them begin the operations on short notice. The GK employees who founded this idea became the active investors and have actually been handling all of the accounting, sales orders, marketing and delivery of the product since then—with the villagers doing the production of the finished shirts. The finished goods have mainly been sold at various GK events throughout the year.
During the focus group that I conducted with the villagers, I was surprised to learn how much they relied on the GK employees and how daunting they felt that some of the business tasks were. With my manager, I helped devise a year-long training and mentoring program that will allow GK to turn the business over to the villagers and give them ownership of the enterprise. One idea that I brought up for training the villagers is to teach them how to make flyers promoting their business and how to obtain new clients—but only communicate that they’ve learned “marketing skills” after they’ve mastered it. This way, we can give them the knowledge, but avoid intimidating them with our business jargon.
In addition, I have been looking over the financial statements of the t-shirt business, which is actually an array of accounting records and receipts that are not completely consistent. I have spent time auditing the main documents, trying to reconcile different accounting forms with one another and even creating balance sheets and cash flow statements. Everything I learned from the Financial Accounting class problem sets is definitely coming in handy now!
Furthermore, I’ve been able to exercise my strategic thinking skills in helping devise a long-term plan for the t-shirt business. Because this enterprise began very suddenly and has mostly been supplying shirts to only GK, there was not a set business plan in place and I have been lucky enough to have the opportunity to help create the value proposition of this enterprise and develop the business model.
Although writing the Rags2Riches case study is one task that I knew I would be doing before I arrived in Manila (and probably sounds the most straightforward), it has also been the one project that has given me the biggest challenges.
R2R is a social business that obtains scraps of cloths from the Payatas dumpsite and hires women from the surrounding dumpsite area (mostly from the GK communities) to “up-cycle” the materials to high-end designer fashion goods. They have created partnerships with famous designers in the Philippines and can sell their goods at a premium price.
However, because the business has generated such a tremendous amount of demand recently, the directors within the company have been very busy trying to figure out how to increase their output and I have been unable to attain a meeting or an adequate level of information on their business model to write a suitable case study.
I currently have a visit schedule next week and am hoping that I’ll be able to finish this final assignment in time for my July 24th departure.
I’m not sure how far the “Manual for Effective Enterprise Development” will turn out, given the lack of successful effective enterprise examples...
In other work-related news, I’ve begun attending Ateneo’s Strategic Management course and it’s been extremely impressive. Although I am sitting in on a course for undergraduate students, the course content and the students’ insight and intellect is at least up to the level of many professional schools in the U.S. They haven’t heard too many questions from the students yet, but they all know who I am and understand that I am available as a resource to them.
In addition, I have been researching specific examples of different microenterprise models in other countries and I’ve been spending a lot of my free time using the BusinessSource Complete and ProQuest databases to obtain those cases.
In my free time, I am hoping to visit a few other development organizations in the region.
Here’s hoping that I can grow the momentum even further and finish my final few weeks here with a strong set of deliverables!
Journal #3
Yesterday was my last day at Gawad Kalinga and I’m heading to Singapore to do a bit of traveling in the region for the next weeks before returning to the States.
Our friends at work threw Cheryl and me a farewell dinner and party last night and it was great fun. I really hope to stay in touch with all of the wonderful people I’ve met. I’ve truly been blown away by all of the enthusiasm and talent that I’ve seen at this NGO.
My last few weeks of work have centered on finishing up my deliverables and trying to wrap up the work I’ve been doing.
The majority of my recent time has been spent talking with the GK workers who run the t-shirt printing business and figuring out their vision for the company.
The villagers who run the t-shirt printing business were recently trained on new printing techniques beyond silk-screen fabrics, and the business team is now considering line-extending their products (e.g. to mugs, caps and other souvenir items).
I was able to complete a first draft of a business plan, where I (among other things) mentioned the Asnoff’s Product-Market Growth matrix that we learned about in Marketing Strategy. I organized the ideas that the business’s founders had in mind and also provided some analysis, with a proposed a timeline of development activities to pursue in the next five years. I anticipate that this document will serve as a record of this organization’s founding and become a guide for future initiatives.
In addition, I created an Excel accounting model that would allow the GK workers and villagers to input their individual transactions into specific journal entries that will feed into formalized financial statements on other sheets. This will hopefully go a long way in helping the business organize itself, after they become officially registered as a company in the Philippines.
Due to the difficulties I ran into with the Rags2Riches case study, my manager eventually partnered me with Marie, an intern from France, who was writing a case study about Human Nature (http://www.humanheartnature.com/)—an organic, environmentally-friendly skin and beauty care company that sources its raw materials out of GK villages.
Human Nature was started by the daughters and son-in-law of GK founder Tony Meloto—Camille Meloto, Anna Meloto-Wilk and Dylan Wilk (a British entrepreneur). Since launching in November 2008, the business has been tremendously successful and is looking to ultimately expand into the U.S. and compete with the Body Shop.
As part of my project, I was able to visit a farm in the Bulacan GK village to see the different materials they use and it was quite interesting to learn how some of the different farming concepts—for example, lemongrass (a very popular fragrance in the U.S.) needs very little attention and apparently grows like a weed in the Philippines. Marie and I put together our findings from our interviews with the company’s founders to deliver insights about Human Nature’s business model, the challenges it’s faced, the way it’s empowered its beneficiaries and the future outlook of the company.
I will be very excited to, one day, see these products on shelves in the U.S.!
The students in Ateneo’s Strategic Management class accompanied us on our trips to the GK villages in Bulacan, Payatas and Gabaldon. While they have still remained pretty shy about asking me or my colleagues (i.e. their mentors for the class) any project-related questions, we’ve become much better acquainted and I’m looking forward to hearing about how their final proposals for the villages turn out.
In my spare time at work, I put together a literature review that summarized some learning that other organizations in different countries faced when putting together trainings or other microenterprise initiatives in their villages. I’m hoping that this will help my manager and GK, as they can keep these experiences in mind during their continued expansion.
I also introduced the idea of working with the CBS International Development Club’s Pangea Advisors to my manager and some other directors in the organization and they seem very optimistic of a future partnership. I am hoping that GK will soon have a greater presence at Columbia.
Furthermore, I met with several people from PinoyME—a Filipino microenterprise consortium that works with a number of local microfinance institutions. I am planning to remain in contact with them and possibly bring this company in for an IDC event sometime in the fall!
Finally, I successfully utilized the CBS network and was able to meet with a 2004 alum—Mary Abad from the Asian Development Bank. She took me and Cheryl out to dinner and talked in great detail about her career trajectory and her time in Manila.
Overall, it was an INCREDIBLE summer, both personally and professionally. I’m so thankful to have had the opportunity to make use of my business school skills while working for a social cause in a developing country, and I know I couldn’t have done this without the Summer Fellowship Program.
