Final Day and Celebration

After a morning of hard work on the individual outline business plans the participants attended a celebration and certificate presentation. We were honoured by local dignitaries attending (British and Gambian) and a local kora player to entertain us.

After the certificate presentation the participants had prepared a surprise presentation in the form of a play which they performed

ACT ONE: The story started with an announcement on Gunjur radio of one of the workshop participants - Ami, advertising her poultry business. Then another woman - Manyima, lamenting that her poultry business was not succeeding and this must be because the successful woman Ami had used witchcraft. A friend tried to persuade Manyima otherwise and took her to see Ami whose staff talked to her about how Ami’s chickens were now better than the competition and that she had attended the BE REEL business training first and that this was the reason for her success. The staff persuaded Manyima that if she did the training her business would improve too.

ACT TWO: A man - Fabakary, was staggering around the stage rather the worse for a few drinks and lamenting that there was nothing left for him in Africa. He thought his only option now was to ‘take the backway’ to enter Europe illegally. Again a friend suggests that he goes to visit Ami. This time we meet Ami who tells the story of how she started her business by buying 50 chickens but 25 died because she did not have the technical skills to rear chickens and then the business also failed because she did not have the management skills to save it. She too had been distraught and thought that she could not succeed. But she had been told about the BE REEL training and had applied - successfully. After the training she realised that she needed to learn the technical skills and had been given the management skills to run the business. She then started the business very small and grown it by managing all aspects and now had a successful business employing 50 people. She persuaded Fabakary to change his attitude and apply for the training as Africa had more to offer him than taking the backway, where he would surely be returned home as an illegal.

The acting was superb and the sentiments were well received by the audience. After the performance we had lunch before everyone departed for the day. Before the participants left Trevor and I were presented with a gift from Ami’s poultry farm (still a micro-business at the moment of course) - a live chicken!