product

It’s all about our customers…

Over the past few months, GCS’ focus has been all about distribution. We’ve figured out how to penetrate the villages with our vehicle and village meetings, but we realized…GCS needs an offseason product! With all our village visits, there seemed to be such a need an interest in phone charging and lighting at night. So…

GCS decided to add one more product to its product line, the SunKing Pro Solar   Light and Phone Charger. 

The lamp is not a product of GCS, but actually a product of Greenlight Planet, another US-founded social enterprise. Why this new non-bicycle-related product?!?

Basically, it’s a great product with a one-year warranty, provides phone charging and lighting in the village with no added infrastructure, and it meets a huge need with great potential as a service product! Just as people could rent out our maize shelling bicycles, people can now rent out these lights. Or on the flip side, just like our maize sheller machine creates micro-entrepreneurship, so do these lights, creating rural employment and empowering entrepreneurs to help themselves climb out of poverty while making an impact in their community.

In setting up the distribution of these lights, when the maize season comes around, we’ll be ready with a massive network!  As for how things are moving, over the past 5 days, we’ve sold 21 lights. Not a bad start…I’ll keep you posted! And stay on the lookout for an upcoming blog post from our very own Reuben!

We have some major changes coming up this holiday season to kick us off into an exciting year ahead.

Jodie | Arusha

Jodie’s Boost: Working with TFA and other Accolades

For the past few weeks, I’ve had this energy boost to get things done.

The first of the extreme things was deciding to just go for it, and rent the place next to the office.  I did bargain it down, and no, it still isn’t that great of a deal, but it brings all my employees within arm’s reach, allowing me to use our second room of our office as room for more employees (as well as a private room from which I can conduct business).  As for the new space, it provides storage, work and living space just next door.  I am particularly excited by this because it has a lot of small luxuries which I’ll love…tiled bathroom, outdoor kitchen (yes, it’s weird), western toilet, hot shower and basically can serve as a guest space for future employees.  I only asked for the place until January of next year, where then I am hoping we will have ordered a container of shellers and bought land on which to store it and build a new place for work, marking the end of our rental days and leaving our only major expense the car fuel we need to run operations.

The second of extreme things was sending Philemon to Karatu on less than 24 hours notice because we were invited to present at World Vision’s annual meeting.  As their meeting was over 100km away and not in an easily accessible place, we rented a friend’s car and drove their straight away.  And because it didn’t make sense just to go there for a meeting, we turned it into a field trip for Philemon where he also went to set up dealers.  Philemon returned the second day with an order for 35 shellers, and the following week, we delivered it in a compact car.  The need for a car became absolutely imperative, and so I presented to the board and leaving the decision to me, I ordered a used Land Rover straight from Japan.  It will be here in two weeks.

And then I guess you can say things have been falling in place.  After Daniel and Reuben’s trip south, I re-engaged TFA, and in essence, TFA has become my second office, going there for multiple meetings to develop terms of trade, marketing strategy, etc.  With this movement, I did the last of “extreme” things.  I found a box manufacturer in town, found a plastics supplier, and now we have all the professional packaging we need to send our products around the world.  I hadn’t done this before as I didn’t feel it was necessary, but now that we’ll be sending 130 sheller kits over to TFA branches in Mbozi, Mbeya, and Iringa, I realized it wasn’t going to happen unless we worked out that details, and so now there’s 1000 boxes with GCS’ logo and contact info coming our way.  We’ll be leaving for southern Tanzania in a week.

Also, East African Community passed a law for free trade

Mbeya and Kyela

After leaving Dar on the 2nd, I headed south to Mbeya to meet Daniel. The plan was to join up with CNFA for their farmer exhibitions. However, upon arriving to the CNFA office on Monday, we learned that the exhibitions were on hold pending funding.

So to make the best of the situation, Daniel and I went to the TechnoServe office the next day (with our newly acquired bike) to follow up with the contact Hillary told me about the week prior. It turned out that the person I was looking for, Iddi, was based in Kyela (about 1.5 hours further south).

I stopped by the Tanganyika Farmers’ Association (TFA) next and met the branch manager, Henry, who agreed to let us hold a demonstration in their parking lot at the end of the week. In the few days leading up to the demo, I printed out flyers and rode the bike around town pubbing our demo to every cell phone shop and agrodealer I saw.

Friday, the day of demo, turned out to be a bit of a disaster as issues with the bike delayed the start for quite a while. Once we got things working, we demo’d the sheller and charger in front of our modest crowd for another 15 minutes before we had to pack up and head to the next site up the road. In total, we gave 6 demonstrations over three days and were well received by the villagers. Fortunately, the subsequent demos ran much more smoothly than the first.

Pleased with our work in Mbeya, we left the sheller and bike at TFA on the 12th as Daniel headed north (with a sheller) to visit other TFA branches and I headed south (with a charger) to meet Iddi in Kyela. Kyela is remarkably much warmer than Mbeya (I didn’t need to wear my sweater at night for example), produces much less maize, almost everyone rides a bike (probably due to the flat landscape and few amount of dala-dalas servicing the town), and lacks power in many of the surrounding villages –> a perfect target market for the charger. It just so happened that the TechnoServe office was in the same building as PRIDE and Tujijenge Microfinance (TMF) so Iddi arranged for me to meet with the branch managers of each.

Over the next 2 days (Thurs and Fri) I visited several groups of villagers with TechnoServe and TMF to talk about the phone charger. TechnoServe has a cocoa farmers program and the farmers I met with were very eager to begin selling GCS chargers. Similarly, the TMF farmer loan groups (councils) I presented to were just as impressed. Over the weekend, I tried my luck in town by showing the charger to
some store owners. It was a tough sell becuase the charger I had wasn’t working and my swahili still isn’t all that great. Nevertheless, I tried to explain that they wouldn’t have to pay now and landed 6 orders in the end.

Days in Dar

Last week I concluded my trip to Dar es Salaam with Philemon for the CNFA Agrodealers Convention. Wanting to make the most out of my time there, I arrived a few days early so that I could meet with some organizations headquartered there. I arrived late Wednesday evening (4/28) and made arrangements to stay with fellow MIT alum Jamie, CEO of EGG-energy. Since I was discouraged from taking the dala-dalas at night in Arusha, I was pretty excited to take one to Jamie’s place in Msasani. A helpful passenger on the bus made sure I got off at the right stop where Jamie came to pick me up.

I started out the next day meeting Hillary, the Country Director of TechnoServe/Tanzania. I showed her videos of our sheller and charger in action and then took out the samples I brought with me. She was very intrigued by what she saw and gave me a handful of contacts to follow-up with. The next stop was the Tanzania Investment Centre (TIC) where my plan was to meet with the Director. The Director was away on travel but I did manage to get a meeting with John the Investment Manager. My videos and samples impressed him so much that he ordered one of each on the spot. John also talked a bit about the benefits that TIC certification would provide us at GCS such as assistance getting residents permits, duty incentives, and greater access to investors. I thanked John for his time and then headed over to FINCA for another impromptu meeting.

One of difficulties of selling products to the rural poor is that many of them can’t afford to purchase them. I was hoping that we could work with FINCA to provide financing to our customer base of agrodealers and maize farmers. Unfortunately, the FINCA President was in a meeting and I was told to come back the next day. The next morning I headed back to FINCA and sat with Issa, FINCA Credit Manager. While not as impressed with our company as John from TIC was, he did see some potential and told me to write a proposal. His main concern was that our sheller is a season product and that a bad harvest to impair the farmers’ ability to repay their loans.

My last stop of the day was the CNFA Convention. At lunch, Philemon and I met with Alfred, the Country Director of KickStart. He gave us a lot of valuable advice on how we should market and sell our products. Towards the end of the Convention, I met Kelly from CNFA who introduced me to a bunch of staff from Dar, Arusha, and Mbeya. She also managed to get Philemon and me a spot at the end of the meeting to show our videos which, after overcoming technical difficulties with the USB drive and projector, went over very well. By the end of the day, we landed over a dozen orders each of both the