This last week we’ve been focused on trying to finish our Kellogg Corps project. The main difficulty was that while we knew what we wanted to show in the final presentation, we still had no data whatsoever. It wasn’t until Wednesday that we finally got our first real business case, and since then we’ve been working like crazy trying to put together the right calculations for external investors, and changing some slides so that we can focus on companies we have information for. We ended up having what we felt was a good presentation by the end of the day Saturday, and after a couple more tweaks on Sunday we feel that we’ve been able to provide exactly what Laure wanted. I think what was most interesting was the difficulty in getting basic information. I think it would be almost incomprehensible to ask for a business loan without having an idea of revenues and costs, or at the minimum what you balance, income and cash flow sheets were for the past few years. Everyone told me I have to expect longer lead times for information, but I guess I just didn’t think it would take quite so long. All in all, we’re pretty happy with what we were able to do, and I am hoping to be able to share our final presentation on the website later so you know what took us so long to put together. I think overall it was a very rewarding experience, and we hope that Laure will be able to develop equity investment capabilities and slowly help Cameroon to develop a thriving middle class.
Laure and Andre both seemed happy with the presentation, or maybe it was the knowledge that we were soon leaving. In either case, we received a couple of cool gifts from them before we had to leave. The first was a wooden plate with our names carved in it, and the second was a dashiki (it’s a lively colored shirt and pants made of a really lightweight material). We said some long goodbyes, and before we knew what was happening, we were already at the airport on our way to Tanzania.
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