Future Business Leaders of Mozambique

Problem Addressed: Even for those fortunate enough to receive an education up to the University level, many Mozambicans often find themselves struggling to provide for themselves and their families with stable, decent paying jobs.

What the Project Hopes To Accomplish: While the leaders of this project do not make any promises of drastic change, they do aim to teach professionalism as well as the basic rules of business, thereby giving involved Mozambicans the tools necessary to succeed.

How: The Future Business Leaders of Mozambique (FBLM), which was created a few years back by Peace Corps volunteers, is in its simplest form an 8 week crash course in business. The 8 weeks course, which is comprised of one two hour class and one two hour workshop a week, brings in local businesspeople to speak about various topics ranging from HIV in the workplace to demographics to basic rules of advertising. Meanwhile, the students themselves are formed into groups and fashion their own business, utilizing the ideas that they have learned in class. At the end of the 8 weeks, the projects are presented to a panel of judges (most likely made up of past speakers and teachers from the school) with the winning group receiving 15,000MT (or about $500) to start their business.

Funding: The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, provides our program with all of the funding it needs for supplies, business finance money, compensation for speakers, etc.
My Role: I manage the class budget, purchase the supplies, and organize the classes (aka monitoring workshops and attendance as well as who’s speaking and when) for the group I form here in my city. I will work alongside a Mozambican counterpart (TBD right now) to help mediate between myself and the school system I know so little about.

What I Am Doing to Start/ Possible Hiccups: I have already talked to the director of the school and he seems very excited about the prospect. One pleasant surprise that came out of our discussion was his desire to have students of FBLM not be the older students who are about to graduate, but the ones that have already left and still do not have work. The way he figures it, this program can at least give some of them a direction to go towards.