Today we ventured out to Kayemor which is close to be border with Gambia. The taxi company would only provide a beaten up old car for the journey and we soon found out why! We had to travel over copper coloured dirt tracks. When a car passed in the other direction we had to quickly close the window to avoid getting a car full of sand. We even had to drive through a river. It was quite amusing seeing the taxi driver baleing out the water that had come through the holes in the floor! The car was seriously old and we had to give it a push to get it started and out of the hotel car park!

Our focus for the day was the 10,000 Girls bissap tea business.They make and sell an organic tea made from the flowers of the bissap plant. They have 5 different flavours of the tea which are selling well in the USA and demand is outstripping supply. They currently give away a large part of their profits by outsourcing the filling of the teabags. They were allocated a grant for a machine to do the filling but are being asked for a business plan. The aim was to help them think through the planning and then document it for them. This would then serve as an example for other 10,000 girls projects.

Anna Lowe helped them break down their processes for making the tea all the way from planting and harvesting the bissap to sending it off for bagging. Marieme Jamme was translating everything into wolof. Anna teased out the current problems and at the same time was identifying the costs of production. She got them to cost out each stage for last year, this year, and project to next year. One problem that surfaced was that due to schooling they pay other people to do some of the labour intensive parts of the process. This meant that they were not left with much money despite all their efforts. They were thirsty for tools and ideas to make the whole operation more profitable for them.

We were able to get them thinking about different ways of organising each stage of the process to improve efficiency. For example, weeding the field took a long time because the ground is hard and the girls do it with their bare hands. By wearing gloves they will not only do it faster but not have lose time waiting for cuts to heal. Because of finances they had not considered gloves. They could now a small investment would result in saving much more money by not having to pay others to do the work whilst they are in school.

Richard White then spent some time on marketing. The machine would significantly increase their capacity for tea bag production and the girls wanted to find customers in Senegal and not just rely on export. They wanted to focus on tourists as the final product is housed in a lovely cloth bag. They identified hotels and resellers as two important areas to focus on in order to reach the tourists. Richard challenged them to think through the processes for persuading hotels to allow them to sell their products or act as resellers for them.

After a late lunch we went to see a field of Bissap as it is close to harvest time. We then returned to the hotel back along the dusty (and occasionally very wet!) road. Bissap can also be used to make a delicious juice and we ended the day seeing what it tasted like with added gin. For product development purposes, of course!