Para Manejar un Negocio

It’s hard to run your own business. People pay thousands of dollars to go to school for years to learn how to do it. And here I am, working with an organization who gives women in developing countries money to start their own businesses who are, on average, educated to the 5^th grade. And we expect them to know how to do be successful. Or maybe we just hope. Many of them do in fact succeed, but not all of them. We give them capacitaciones every time they take out a new loan (every 3-4 months) but they can’t learn everything they need to in those 30-45 minutes.

We’ve been giving our first round of workshops of the Ikatu program (setting and reaching goals) this week, and this will continue into next week. In the meantime we’ve started writing our next workshop, which will be on planning and budgeting. It seems like a simple thing to you to know whether you’re earning more money selling something than you’re spending on the raw materials used to make it, but that’s because you were educated past the 5th grade.

I tried to explain to a woman the other day the difference between her sales and her profit—that she wasn’t earning everything she was given from selling her empanadas because she had paid for the ingredients that went into her product. This was a difficult concept to get across, and it had nothing to do with my Spanish.

These women are not stupid. I want to emphasize that. They just haven’t ever been taught. This is where we come in. We have two hours to teach them how to make and keep one budget for their business and one for their family that allows for some savings and provisions for emergencies. And in each comité, there are one or two women who don’t know how to read and write. This is where drawings come in. We’re still working out how to teach this effectively to women who have no previous knowledge of the idea, in a way that will serve its purpose but not be overly complicated.

But it is so hard to change behaviors, to create habits. At the end of these, I often go home wondering, Are they actually going to do what we’ve just taught them?