Josel makes some adjustments to some of his slides.
Final data crunching
Kurt and Erin discuss some salient points
A toast! We are heading into halftime with a very clear idea of what we need to do come the 2nd half. It has been a tremendously enriching experience. Business on the Front-Lines impacts you, but Rwanda embraces you and changes you forever. Rwanda is rich in culture a fact that can often get overlooked. We have enjoyed the food, the music, the dances, the laughter and even the tears. Rwanda is a vibrating country that is fast accelerating.
We spend most of the 2nd last day doing data analysis and prepping our initial presentation in this 15-week journey. When you follow the ‘evidence’ it sometimes will lead to places you did not expect. This is what began to happen as we crunched the research data, we found that several ideas that were coming forth were either ideas that we had not even considered or some that we had discounted.
In between we had two meetings one with the Rwanda Development Board (RDB) and the other with the Rwanda Ministry of Youth and ICT. The ministry has 3 strategic focuses: finance, information, and markets. We discussed entrepreneurship development, business case competitions, and a special bank lending program for youth that doesn’t require immediate payback, giving the youth an opportunity to develop their ideas. One interesting thing that we learned is that Windows will be launching in the Kinyarwanda language soon. We spent the rest of the night finalizing the presentation.
Muriel and Angelique, CRS Rwanda employees who doubled up as our translators during the market research.
Anne makes a point during the presentation.
An attentive audience.
Time to say ‘Murakoze’ and ‘Murebeho’ (Kinyarwanda for ‘Thank you’ and, ‘Goodbye’) from us and from CRS Rwanda staff led by Country Director LeAnn Hager.
Sitting down to dinner after presentation.
A toast!
On our last day we did our presentation, which ran over 2 hrs due to questions asked during the presentation and towards the end. The CRS Rwanda team is eager to use our feedback on some of the tools they are using for market assessment and have scheduled a conference call for Friday March 22, 2013, to discuss some immediate changes they can make. In the meantime we will spend the next four weeks preparing our final report. We are only halfway done but we deserved a toast.
We were able to make it in time for our flights and off back to school where classes start on Monday 18th March 013