Student Ventures and Project Zulu — entrepreneurship is South Africa!

Hey everyone, I’m Billy, an intern in the Student Ventures team.

I recently returned from Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa, as part of a volunteering trip with Project Zulu, an educational charity who are in partnership with the University of the West of England.

To encourage the development of Entrepreneurial skills in partner schools, my friend Diana and I ran a young enterprise competition whilst out there and taught the class 10–2 entrepreneurial skills for them to implement in their own market stalls that they’d set up during the project. As a Team Entrepreneurship student, it was a great experience being on the other side of the desk and educating ambitious students. Here’s what the trip looked like and what I learned during the two weeks…

Week 1

Diana and I began on the Monday being introduced to class 10–2 at Phendukani Full Service High School. We soon got them into six teams and began with an ideation session on how to creatively generate ideas. Class 10–2 let their minds run free and quickly came up with these team names and products to sell:

1. Starbars — coffee and cakes.
2. Joyful Marketing — sandwiches, coffee and popcorn.
3. Sweety Pearls — (lots and lots of) sweets.
4. The Supreme Rainbows — sandwiches and hotdogs.
5. The Unexpected Express — packs of sweets, hot chocolate, cakes and sandwiches.
6. Born to Win Enterprises — fresh doughnuts, packs of sweets and snowpies (whatever they are!).

So the stage was set and the kids had determined what they’d be selling at the market in week 2. Diana and I doubted whether they’d even be able to produce so much food but we’d soon learn that we were wrong to doubt them.

The rest of the week saw us teaching the teams some of the core business skills they’d need, such as pitching their businesses, marketing their products, calculating their profit and more. The teams overcame many challenges. Some faced internal disputes, others felt threatened by the competition from their rivals and Born to Win Enterprises found out that they had no idea how to make a Snowpie.

Diana and I faced challenges too. We’d originally been told that we’d have two hours with the kids per day, but our teaching time was cut down to one. Because of this, we were forced to think on our feet and adapt our pre-made lesson plans, including one about product-pricing, which would prove to be a fatal mistake in week 2.

We ended the first week by taking one student from each team to a wholesaler to purchase their stock. When the students found out that they could cut costs by combining their limited budgets to buy common items that they needed in bulk, they began teaming up with each other in a heartwarming display of good business-sense.

We ended the day by treating the students to a meal at Chicken-Licken (South Africa’s answer to KFC) and ensuring that they had laid out their plans for running the market the following week.

Week 2

Diana and I arrived at the school to a pleasant surprise on the Monday of the second week. We arrived at the consumer studies kitchen to find the classroom a hive of activity. Students ran back and forth from their fridges to their workspaces carrying tins of coffee, packs of flour and sugar, loaves of bread, sweets, chocolates, vegetables, frankfurters and everything else they needed for their market. We couldn’t express how proud we were of the children for striving so hard to make their ventures successful.

At lunchtime that day, the market began. The students carried their desks from their classrooms to the playground and started to sell. The bell rang and a flurry of hungry customers flocked to the stalls. A few minutes of frenzied selling later and all of 10–2’s stalls had sold out — not a single cake, sandwich, hotdog, sweet, doughnut or anything else remained. And yet, where the faces of the young entrepreneurs of 10–2 should’ve displayed glee, instead they seemed dismayed.

It turned out that our omittance of the lesson on product pricing had come back to bite us. In a bid to offer the lowest prices and best portions to their fellow students, 10–2 had drastically underpriced their products. When the treasurers of each team counted up their revenue, they found that they hadn’t made any profit.

When we returned to class on the Thursday of that week, the mood had changed. 10–2 were less eager to learn, less enthusiastic, and more unruly. Their losses at the market had clearly taken a toll on their hopes of becoming entrepreneurs. They’d worked so hard marketing their businesses, pitching them, creating their stock and making sure that the whole neighbourhood knew about the market, so it was a blow to them that they hadn’t made any money.

10–2 had worked so hard that Diana and I couldn’t leave on a low. After all, Coca-Cola only sold a few hundred bottles in their first year. The Space-x Falcon rocket crashed three times before it successfully launched on its fourth attempt. The first Harry Potter book was shunned by publishers 12 times before one finally took on the book and made JK Rowling the first author to become a billionaire.

We told 10–2 this, reminding them that entrepreneurship is all about embracing failure and that no one gets it right their first time. The lessons they’d learned over the past two weeks were far more valuable than a few hundred Rand. After all, it was Nelson Mandela who’d said “Do not judge me by my successes, judge me by the number of times I fell and got back up again”.

Diana and I handed out some awards to the teams and congratulated them once more on their hard work before saying some emotional goodbyes.

In the end, although the students failed to generate any profit, their learnings proved to be the ultimate gain. Diana and I learned just as much (if not more) than they did and had the most amazing two weeks in Kwazulu-natal too. All in all, Project Zulu was incredible and I’d thoroughly recommend it to anyone with an interest in enterprise and adventure.

If my story has inspired you to start something for yourself, perhaps creating and selling snowpies(!) Get in touch with the Student Ventures Team to discuss your ideas and for help with putting them in action.