http://www.amsterdamfm.nl/business-tanzania

This year we are travelling to Dar es Salaam again with 14 students to do research in cooperation with local students focussing on private health care.

Yesterday, 12th of june, I drove back from Morogoro to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania after a meeting at Mzumbe University with the Mzumbe students. Its part of the preparationmeetings in Tanzania to make a start for the second time. Again we will be working on improving the entrepreneurial environment for private health clinics and their owners with a group of students.

This image stands for the thing we have slowly started, seing things in perspective while enjoying the beauty of Tanzania. Looking back while going forward, using different angles and reflections. I will keep taking pictures on the road in Tanzania.

I hope you will be following us on this trip, learning together with us, supporting us and hopefully also becoming enthusiastic about healthcare! There are more posts to come.

In the last years my colleagues of CIS (Centrum voor Internationale Samenwerking) have worked with the people of Mzumbe University to do capacity building. Some Mzumbe researchers got scholarships for a PhD Program, some lecturers did a Msc Program and other people did training. From our faculty some people visited to work with local students and colleagues to teach, do research and do training.

Now this capacity building program has ended and our Faculty and their faculty aim to extend the cooperation beyond the initial program. One of the activities is to set up the TAN2010 project.

Now this new cooperation starts with the connection me and Mr Seif Muba Msc have from the year 2008. He was attending my course called Managerial Integration Project as an Msc Business Administration student. He graduated and I was lucky to be there when he got his degree!

The questions we come up with are:

• Is Tanzania a place where everything is cheap?

• Why are things more expensive in Holland?

• What does it mean to develop?

• What does your money buy you?

• Do you consider you country expensive or cheap?

This because Muba’s car was fixed in a nondescript street in Dar es Salaam for 20.000 Tanzania Shilling.

The coolingsystem was taken apart, fixed and installed again, new liquid was put in and all seemed to be working well. But halfway to Morogoro (200km drive), the motor was heating up and all kinds of lights were flashing. We concluded that the 20.000 shilling did not include a guarantee, it was not efficient (we had to guard the worker and the car and it took 3 hours) and the safety and quality of repairing was low. Maybe it was expensive in the end.

After some thinking we realise that a lot of things are actually very expensive in Tanzania as they need to be imported. Its difficult to find out where to buy the things you need and guarantees are until the end of the street. You never know if the guy that repaired the car had any knowledge about it and if his intention was to actually fix it. Also, in this case, the workconditions were very bad as there were no workshop equipments to do the repairs or environmental checks.

Now below are different viewpoints and i do not intend to be scientific here. Just some insights after today’s and yesterdays conversations in the car.

It turns out from research that things in poor areas are actually expensive because of monopolies, informationscarcity, distrust and distribution problems. The numbers say that in a slum in Mumbay credit costs 600% a year while in the upmarket Mumbai banks the going rate was 12 to 18%. Another example from this research by Prahalad and Hammond (2002) was diarrhea medication being USD 20 in the slum and USD 2 (two) in the expensive area. Apparently there is a poverty penalty on goods and services.

The other issues are that:

1. there is no cooperation between people to share resources, once they are shared its easier to venture and create value
2. the capitalinvestments in a poor country are difficult to realise and depend on government approval
3. the market is not working well and people rely on the government to direct information, subsidies and effort.

I should say these are random thougts. The questions at the beginning are not answered and the arguments are not worked out yet. This week Muba and me will be discussing this some more. We hope to give you some more insights.

Arriving in Dar es Salaam This was the streetview in one area.

We visited a few shops and met a few businessowners, some with a shop, some streetvendors some with a serviceconcept like this barber with a shop called Amsterdam Barbershop.

On the road to Mzumbe University we got an amazing view of the area of Morogoro. There are just a few cars on the street, some trucks and buses and many bikes.

This Bibi was bringing supplies to a restaurant.

And, off course, the local streetrestaurants are thriving.

I hope, this way, you get some impression of the travels, views and experiences of me going to Mzumbe University in Morogoro, Tanzania. The people are very nice, like to make a chat and are smiling and joking around. The landscape is amazing, these people have a beautiful country. The poverty is everywhere with a big division between the haves and havenots.

In the coming year our intention is to have 8 Mzumbe University and 8 VU University students participate in a Business Course of two weeks held at Mzumbe University in Morogoro Tanzania. Our vision is that people learn from experience and cooperation while working on a common aim.

Mzumbe University is located in Morogoro city, 200 kilometers from Dar es Salaam (translated: City of Peace) the capital of Tanzania.

Vu University is located in Amsterdam, Holland.

The basic principles of the program:
:: learning from doing and cooperating
:: creativity instead of money
:: add value by using your skills, knowledge and caracter
:: social responsibility and business go hand in hand
:: building on relations for the long term

What we need for the program are contacts, support and ideas. We hope that you, the reader, can help us develop the program further.

Mr Muba, a graduate of the Msc of Business from the Faculty of Economics and Businessadministration works for the Faculty of Commerce. Mr Christer Guldemond (me) works for the Faculty of Economics and Businessadministration (FEWEB) of VU University Amsterdam. We will cooperate with the support of both faculties and deans.

In the coming months I hope to report regularly on the developments of the project and the support we are getting from different people. Like John Mayer did with his last record, we intend to do publicity, design, production and sales at the same time.

In my opinion the subject had better results than previous years due to better lecturers, more time spent on managing the course (we spent 50% more time on the subject than allowed by the budget) and better students. Im thankful for the fact that Im allowed to work with the best students in business. They keep amazing me with enthusiasm, energy, new solutions, ambition and humor.

As for the other side of working with students, I sometimes find the lack of reflection difficult. I also find the harshness of their communication and the lack of empathy shocking. It seems the view of students on teachers and education is not much better that that on politics or the IRS (belastingdienst). They want results and succes and they want it now, if they dont get it its your fault. Still, working with the future leaders of our country’s businesses is a wonderful opportunity for me.

I learned a lot too. There are some good things and some improvements I got back from the evaluation:

+/+ personal involvement

+/+ motivating to get the most out of the student

+/+ unorthodox elements

+/+ engaging and entertaining

+/+ have students find things out by themselves

+/+ treat students like normal people, not kids

-/- chaotic

-/- late with appointments and feedback

-/- sloppy

-/- not explaining enough about expectations and procedures

From a student in the digital evaluation:



De structuur van het vak. Blackboard is ook bijzonder chaotisch ingericht, net zoals het course manual wel verbetering kan gebruiken. Ik vermoed dat de cordinator een bijzonder getalenteerd consultant is, maar dat zijn talenten niet zozeer het organisatorische vlak beslaan. Zoek hierin samenwerking met iemand die hier wel getalenteerd in is. Dat is ook een van de adviezen die wij kregen als groepen, zoek ieders kracht en laat deze uitkomen en vind hier harmonie in. Dit kan zeker worden toegepast op de organisatie van dit zeer kansrijke vak.

This is the score I got so you know:

I want to thank all of you students, mentors, faculty, companies and advisors for the experience and the possibility to make this work. I learned a lot and had a lot of fun, what more can you ask? Im curious what I will be doing next year, no idea yet. If you have any idea what I should do please post a comment or mail me.

This interview with Chris Botti sums it up nicely: http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2009/04/29/lkl.chris.extra.cnn?iref=videosearch

From the evaluation we got back from the students about what they learned I give you the following points. I selected a series from the feedbackform that I got from our Admin to show you the differences in experience. In answer to the question ‘what did you learn from the course?’

6. I learned how consultancy works in real life. How to talk with clients, how to gather information.
7. How to work and act as a consultant
8. Not really something that I did not learned during the projects in my previous study. (things like
the importance of deriving the right customer wishes and things like that
9. Working in a group, and handle with the problems during the process with my group members
10.how to write a consultancy report, and working on a practice base of doing research and writing a report that will be used for practice goals.
11. Cooperation with teammates from different tracks.
12. Writing a consultancy report
13. Nothing
14. Working in groups
15. working in a team on reallife case
16. nothing
17. I improved my analytical skills along with presenting and explaining to practitioners. Specifically about our project, I learned a little bit more about the Dutch Judiciary system. Learned how to work in small\large scale group with people from different backgrounds.
18. Real life case. Balance between rationalism and people.
“Levenservaring’ is the best term I can come up with.
The deliverables are so intangible that it is hard to adequately describe what I have learned.

To me it shows that its very difficult to teach and make all involved happy. Many people think they are not learning but its never true. There should be something you could learn if only how NOT to organise a subject or how NOT to conduct a consulting job or for that matter, how NOT to mentor. If you did not learn anything during 2 months you could be in the wrong program.

Some of the mentors do sense, during the course, that the students go through a development, learning a lot from the experience and having difficulties with applying what they have learned before. We see students do a very professional job, excelling in all that is asked from them and even surpassing the expectations of the client and the mentor.

Apart from that some of the mentors also sense that some students are naive in their approach of companies, lack practical experience and some mentors even question the value of this type of education (MSC in BA) for recruiting companies. Many students don’t have any practical experience once they enter working life. It seems students have not much affinity with the process of work, doing business and handling professional relationships.

The question ‘Which aspects of the course should be
improved according to you?’ yielded some of the following:

2. Regel voldoende opdrachten voor de gehele groep of regel geen enkele opdracht. Dit is zo flauw. Wat is dan het nut van het feit dat we zelf een organisatie dienen te vinden? Zo doe je af aan je eigen opdracht. Ontzettend krom..
9. I really do not like that we cannot pick our own teammembers. Although I do not have real problems with my group, but it somehow felt uncomfertable in a project as in important as this one. This didn’t gave me the exciting feeling to do the project as I wish I could have. I know in real life you cannot pick your collagues and clients as well, but at least you have a choice to work there or not. Also, the handing out of the projects were chaotic. With a lot of ‘fighting’ over the projects, my teammate and I managed to get one. Also, the project was really far. I had to travel 2,5 hours to visit the company.
19. MIP takes a lot more time when you want to do a good investigation.
20. Frankly it is quite idiotic to organize assignments for 1/2 of the group. Either don’t organize
assignments at all or you make sure you have enough assignments for all the groups.
21. Time schedule. The input is way too much for a course of 3 credits.
22 It should be entirely English speaking course – for everyone. The groups are too big. Communicate the requirements more clearly.

The question: ‘Which aspects of the course are you satisfied with?’ was answered with the following first 9 points of 39
1. good idea to practice real consulting project.
2. Het concept, het idee dat we als studenten zelf een organisatie zoeken om daar advies aan te
geven. Het kan heel leerzaam zijn, maar de structuur van het vak doet hier aan af. Er worden veel kansen gemist omdat het niet goed, of half geregeld is.
3. it is a real-life case, which makes it interesting. students get to learn how the consultancy works
in practice.
4. Good tutorial teacher!
5. Flexiable time arrangement
6. None
7. emparical course, team composed with students from different specialization
8. real life experience.
9. Practical perspective of this course. The course takes up too much time to be worth only 3 ECTS. It is not in proportion.
There is not a lot of guidance from the faculty, but maybe that is not needed. It is a good opportunity to get know the consulting world.

The mentors need to involve students more, give more feedback (structure and feedback are really needed) and give more attention. There was a difference between the approaches of mentors which is normal in teaching. This could have been solved by more communication between mentors. The distribution of assignments definitely should have been better and the composition of teams was not up to standard.

Some months ago the news got out the subject will be dropped in the new program starting 2010. I hope some new experience oriented course or internship will come back.

In previous years we also did sports with locals, as we did with the UI students last week. It seems to bring a connection between people, gets the emotions going and is a shared experience. It has always been nice to do a local game. Some examples from previous years: In Vietnam 2007 we played on the beach with childred who were disabled due to the chemicals used by the Americans in the war. A chemical called Agent Organge was used to undo trees of their leaves and show the Vietcong. This turned out to be benzene: Apple Dictionary: " benzene |ˈbenËŒzÄ“n; benˈzÄ“n| noun a colorless volatile liquid hydrocarbon present in coal tar and petroleum, used in chemical synthesis. Its use as a solvent has been reduced because of its carcinogenic properties. • Chem. formula: C 6 H 6. ORIGIN mid 19th cent.: from benzoin + -ene."

In India 2005 the students played cricket and had a good time playing against Indians and getting instructions.

Heineken is the most international beerbrand there is, active in almost all countries of the world and in the top 10 in the world. They produce in Indonesia since the beginning of the last century. The name of the local company is now MultiBintang and the brand they use is Bintang (Star in Bahasa Indonesia)

Multibintang as a locally listed company but controlled by Heineken in the Netherlands. They produce on two locations, Tangerang in Jakarta and in Surabaya. The beer is transported by trucks across the country, just like the one you see below. You will see this kind of truck from north sumatera until the end of sumbawa (roughly 3500 km apart)

What do the students pick up from it?

As it is an official group-company-visit they are all dressed up smartly and have their presents ready. They ask good questions and keep their eyes open. (not so easy as they are tired of the trip)

Walking around the factory they learn about the way a process is set up, the way people work, the real things of a factory, the administrative side. (Im not sure they can recollect all this but Im sure they picked it up subconsciously

They are interested in what it looks like in real life, working abroad. In Holland it sounds so nice, being an expat for this amazing company Heineken. But on location its different, you see the practical side, the hardworking side and a bit of the loneliness of working abroad. You are selfsupporting in most ways and are allowed to run a company by yourself while reporting to the shareholders in Indonesia and regional Heineken headquarters.

In 1996 I spent 3 weeks in Jakarta doing research for a Dutch company in a team of 3 people. The country has changed and students have changed, or should I say the world has changed. At that time ING borrowed us 3 mobile phones and all of us fought to use them. Back then we visited the Bintang Factory and we took a picture just like this one:

My personal experience, coming here after 13 years, now as a supervising professor is that of reflection and recognition. I have been able to use my experience from that time to help the students improve their travelling- and research-experience.