First let me introduce the crew here. Dave is a fellow MBA student.
Efigenia is the regional manager and Felipe is her assistant. They live here in Beira and have been working with Ascend for about a year. Felipe speaks English pretty well and helps translate for Efigenia.Aldalpho is the first entrepreneur who we will be working with to get his business going. He is a member of the Church and seems to be very sharp. He is pretty motivated and works hard.
Jack is a retired man who has been here for four months working with Ascend. He is an engineer and knows a lot about the pumps and what Ascend is trying to do here. He has lived all over the world volunteering with Ascend.
Eric is an undergraduate student doing a year-long internship here. He is also working with an NGO called Care for Life and will be working with agribusinesses to improve their gardens.
Efigenia, the regional manager spent the morning at the bank while the rest of us went to Lingao with Felipe, Adalpho, Jack, and Eric. We saw a pump that Adalpho installed yesterday and helped him get another one started. These are the first two pumps that he has sold and is being paid to install. He has been in training with Ascend for the past few months and is ready to get started making money. We are tasked developing a business plan for him that can be replicated for several other water technicians like him.
The drive to Lingao was about an hour on terrible dirt roads and made me grateful for a government that develops the infrastructure of the country. Although the drive was long the countryside was rather pretty and green – the rainy season just ended here.
In addition to visiting Adalpho’s work site we visited a previous site where Ascend installed a pump at a women’s house (her name is Maria). In talking to the town officials of Lingao to get permission to work there Ascend asked who would benefit from one of the pumps and the officials gave Ascend Maria’s name. Maria is a widow with children, who had land (I think the land was given to her in a homesteading type manner), but she did not have a house or any means to develop the land. Ascend installed a pump and within a few days she had land cleared for planting and her neighbors helped build a house for her on the land. She takes good care of her garden and it seems as though she sees the real potential in having water to take care of the land. She has planted several things and is anxiously waiting to have produce to sell so she can plant more and expand her garden.
We spent the afternoon running errands and trying to collect all the materials needed to install a pump tomorrow in a town called Tica (70 Km from Beira). We realized quickly the logistics issues in gathering all of the materials and getting technicians to work sites with all the proper tools and materials. I know that sounds easy, but in a developing country that is not as easy as it sounds. So far this appears to be one of the bottlenecks in allowing the technicians to sell and install a high volume of pumps. We are working on some solutions to this as well as some of the other issue in creating this business.
