Our Two-Week Marathon: Preparing for October 3&4 GRAND OPENINGS

Our work at COSAD Tanzania has gone from 10mph to 100mph in just a few days.  Almost one week ago, our director and his family arrived in Bukoba to finish several details for our Social Enterprise Projects’ Grand Openings on October 3rd & 4th.

These Social Enterprise Projects (SE Projects) include the COSAD Women’s Cooperative Goat Farm, the COSAD Clinic, Imuka Recording Lounge, and the Bukoba Business Lounge.  Each project will be run as a local, private business for profit, to support COSAD’s existing programs and goals.  For example, the COSAD Women’s Cooperative Goat Farm raises and breeds the specific breed of goats best suited for milk production, locally.  This means we no longer have to buy and transport the goat from different cities (or countries in some cases), greatly decreasing the cost we once had to raise to give one woman a goat in the One Woman, One Goat (OWOG) program.  Further, the goat farm will be used as a free training facility to easily train women with goats on best-practices and proper care.  The profits from the goat farm (as with all of our SE Projects) will be used to help support COSAD programs like OWOG that used to be solely reliant on donations from the USA to be successful. 

The theories behind the business structure of each SE Project are a big step in striving towards COSAD’s vision of “empowering Tanzanians to become economically independent, one community at a time”.  Of course, theories, planning, and preparation are only the beginning stages of any project, and that is exactly where we are in Bukoba right now: preparing and praying for the success of our SE Projects after our Grand Openings on October 3rd & 4th!

Our Grand Opening will be a two-day event ‘opening’ all four of our SE Projects, and it is meant to serve as a marketing event & open house so our community can connect with the services the clinic, business lounge, and recording studio will provide.  Our women and village partners will be a huge part of the Grand Openings, and rightly so.  Since my visit in 2012, I have been hearing how anxious and ready the women are to see further growth that will help their communities; especially in regards to the opening of the clinic.  The Grand Openings ceremony will be in line with the Tanzanian cultural expectations for such an ceremony- meaning lots of singing, dancing, food, and speeches!  (I will post pictures!)

For those of you who would like to know more about each SE Project and how it will affect and contribute to the mission of COSAD, I will follow up with more details in my coming posts.  For now, I wanted to highlight the basics for our Grand Openings, and invite you to celebrate with us since they are a major source of excitement and celebration within the COSAD Tanzania community this month!  

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