Alleviating Poverty through
Biblically Based Business

Katwe is one of the worst slums in Kampala, a mixture of ramshackle buildings with mud or cardboard walls and tin roofs, with entire families living in one room, and an open sewer running through the 'street'. A high proportion of orphans can be found in the streets, victims of the AIDS epidemic that has wiped out a large proportion of the adult generation.

For the most part, the mud walls provide warmth and protection, but they fall victim to the heavy rains which wash away the foundations. During our first visit, the rain pictured here caused a large building to collapse on the people inside it, leaving 50 dead from crushing and suffocation. But poverty and death are no strangers to the people of Uganda: 35% of the population earn less than £1 per day, and every year 200,000 children die before the age of 5 - that is one every three minutes.

But the people of Uganda do not seem to see these tragic facts as reasons to give up hope, and one of the most enduring memories of our first visit to Uganda was the smiling, welcoming faces and the relentless drive for cleanliness. Ugandans, at least the ones we met, seem to have a deeper sense of joy and contentment than many Westerners, even rich Westerners, let alone those in our troubled housing estates. And they wage a constant battle against the red dust which seems to get everywhere.

People make an income where they can. The picture on the right is of a market in one of the poor areas of Kampala. The small piles in the bottom right of the picture that look like discarded potatoes are actually cassava and other vegetables - each clump representing a separate market stall; the total that some people have to sell. Others in the market make and sell clothes.

This form of income, through tailoring, is something that Pastor Paul has been promoting in his community in Katwe. The picture on the right is of a 'night' class where the women are learning to sew garments together. They learn on brown paper (which is a lot cheaper) in the school room that their children have recetly vacated at the end of the school day.

Another common form of income is brick making. These three men are making mud bricks using a machine to press the mud into blocks, but most still use wooden moulds for the work. Once the bricks have been moulded they are banked up into a small thick walled building with space inside for a fire which 'fires' the bricks so that they can be used. The mud is in plentiful supply, and bricks in constant need. Clay bricks are stronger and last longer, but the sources of clay are much fewer.

The man on the right, Geoffrey, has established a business making biscuits in a reed thatched lean-to. He sells his buscuits to a range of shops early each morning, delivering them by bicycle, and with the money he is paid for them he buys his new ingredients for the day. These he mixes up in an old battered bowl, with the broken handle of a spade, and rolls the dough out on the large board you see, which is balanced on two trestles. The bottle he is holding is the smaller of his two rolling pins, the larger is a long broom handle. He cuts out the shapes and loads them onto trays which he loads into a brick oven which he built himself.

The oven is fired by logs (see right) and is difficult to control to the right temperature, but Geoffrey perseveres.

Geoffrey was so keen to attend the training, that he worked extra shifts the week before, loaded his two room house literally half full with biscuits, and then worked nights during the time when the training was on in order to ensure his customers continued to get their orders. A large part of his income goes in school fees for his two children.

Education is known to be the best way out of poverty but state provision does not serve many in the community, and so Pastor Paul set up a school in Katwe. For parents who can pay for their children's education, it costs about £100 per year, but there are few of these people and many orphans, and so teachers often go months without a salary and few are paid what they are worth. Teachers in Paul's school also tend to house the orphans of the community until the work on the orphanage is finished early in 2008.

The class you can see above right is year 1 infants, and is the left most brick unit in the picture on the right, which shows the outside of six classroooms around the school yard. As you can see, there is a severe lack of books available, but since these pictures were taken a generous gift from Hatfield Heath School has been used to buy some books and other equipment.

The lack of 'playstations' is compensated for by a greater level of cooperative play and creativity. The picture on the right shows the child built see saw, constructed from a block of wood and a large plank.

But probably the most impressive toy I saw was the truck on the right. Cut out of an old plastic oil bottle, with nails for axles and caps for wheels, this was never seen far from the boy whose proud possession it was. He spent ages crossing the site, loading it with soil at one place and towing his load back to empty it elsewhere.

But the school is run-down, and Pastor Paul (seen right) is building a new one, with an orphange and a clinic combined. As you can see, work is well underway on this and some classrooms are now almost useable (see the photo below right). Paul has links in both Finland and the UK who help to fund this work and also to sponsor children through the school. Hand-in-Hand is a very active partner in this work.

Education equips people for employment, but sadly it does not provide very many jobs. The upper junior school children on the right are in a better position than their parents, but not by much, and so a key priority for Uganda is the development of employment opportunities.

That is where our work comes in, we are hoping to help people to set up their own small businesses in order to: feed themselves; send their children to school; and eventually to employ others out of poverty.

The people of Katwe are far from apathetic to this aim, and an impromtu Sunday afternoon meeting called to pick up on some of the key issues we observed in our short visits to local business people had a suprisingly large number of attendees.

The meeting could not possibly do anything more than scatch the surface, but it did build up a relationship and an enthusiasm in us to do something more substantial.

Here, Jamie MacAlister is using some passages of scripture to illustrate some basic points of marketing, and is assisted in translation by Livingstone Mukasa who himself has a successful cleaning business in Kampala

Our longer term solution to the issues we observed was to produce some very basic business training - one to help people set up businesses, and the other to help those with established businesses to grow and create jobs for others.
The material was developed to keep things as simple as possible, and to include many exercises and illustrations to help people to grasp the key points - & (in book 1) to develop a complete business plan.

The material was tested and refined over several cycles - firstly within the UK, and subsequently in Uganda. Feedback was used to refine the materials to a point where we could pilot the training on our first group in Uganda - the picture on the right and just below are of discussion groups within that original pilot training - overall we trained 40 people in that session.

The pilot group provided valuable feedback which was used to refine the materials still further, and to develop a session plan for delivering the training and a comprehensive set of notes on how to effectively use the blackboard and the flipchart within the training.

The second step was to take some of the people from the pilot group, and to train them as trainers to deliver the learning to others. This was done in February 2007, almost exactly one year after the initial visit to see how we could help. The trainer training consisted of both sessions on training theory, and then lots of putting it into practice using the actual materials which they would be training others in. The photo on the right shows one of these session where on trainee trainer is practicing on his colleagues and will then receive feedback from them.

Overall, 23 people were trained to train others in Workbook 1(see the photo on the right of the group at the end of the course), and since then they have been training a new group in the materials every month.

Overall, 400 new people have been trained in the 12 months since trainer training, and we now know that that has translated into 200 newly successful businesses, according to the survey which was completed in May 2008.