Sat 27 th – Blue Safari

After a hard day’s work, we decided to have our first leisure day, and headed for the Blue Safari Tour. It was a day long snorkeling trip, with unfortunately more travelling than snorkeling, and one too many Italian tourists. Although there was a lot to see, the reef and fishes were lacking the ‘rainbow colours’ that we were hoping to see. However, the lunch more than made up for the snorkeling. We were served lobster, shrimp and octopus, which tasted exactly like bacon! Boat trip back to Zanzibar was a challenge, because in a mean while had risen strong wind that almost ripped our overcrowded boat into pieces. Fortunately we passed a mangrove swamp on our way back where we found a windless place to heal the sails and to continue crossing the bay more smoothly. After arriving back to the shore, everybody felt a bit sunburned.






/Kati, Markus and Jan

Friday 26th – Harvesting and drying seaweed

It was rise and shine at 7am to meet three local women who would show us what was involved in planting, collecting and drying the seaweed. To help us with interpretation, we had a local friend, Able, from the Zanzibar Adventure School. Small pieces of seaweed were tied to the ropes and left to grow for 2 weeks in shallow water. Thereafter they were retied and left for another month before they were harvested. The harvested seaweed was left to dry, where they lost about 50% of their weight, and each kg of dried seaweed was then sold for 180 Tanzanian Shillings (~0.18 USD).










After breakfast we had a lecture from Rasmus, one of the teachers at Zanzibar Adventure School, about the environmental impacts associated with growing seaweed. He also described another project in testing phases about using seaweed as a fertilizer. At the moment, local women are using a ‘slash and burn’ agricultural method, where big parts of forests are burnt to release nutrients to the land to grow crops. This causes big ecological problems here as the land is destroyed thereafter. Rasmus also brought us to see the actual plantations where the testing was carried out.




After that, we visited the Seaweed Center, and seeing how much had been done was an awesome experience! Everyone fell in love with the buildings, even though they were not complete, and have a look at them for yourself in the pictures below!

Thur 25th - A Flying Arrival

We literally hit the ground running upon our arrival in Dar Es Salaam! We had a mere two hours to clear the customs, pick up our bags, and head to the ferry towards Zanzibar. It was no easy feat to weave through the traffic and we were slipping and sliding like hot butter in between two pieces of toast. It was only in the bus that we realized how hot the weather was, but coming from the frozen lands of Sweden, we had promised that we wouldn’t complain about the weather! Some local people were coming up to us selling grapes and water and other fruits when our bus stopped at traffic lights, and it was also quite a shock sometimes to see a head suddenly bobbing by the side of the window unexpectedly. We were surprised how nice the ferry was and it looked like a small cruise ship. The ferry was followed by another hour of daladala ride (the local form of taxi) on Zanzibar. The Daladala ride was a ride of a lifetime, and all of us were packed into a small truck with open sides and our luggage on top.




The hard benches were harassing our asses throughout the 1,5 hour trip. The driver was speeding as hell as he had somebody chasing us. Some cars were trying to pass our daladala very dangerously. We were joking that there will be news in the Swedish press about 20 killed Chalmers students. Not sooo nice…



And finally, after a total of 28-hours, we arrived to the village of Paje! Despite the fact that there was no electricity on the island, or that we were sleeping in hot stuffy rooms, feeling the sand beneath our feet and gazing at the thousands of stars twinkling at us in the cloudless sky, it was no doubt we have arrived on a paradise on earth!

/Kati, Jan and Markus

To Zanzibar we go!

After more than one and a half years of hard work, we are finally going to Zanzibar! You will be able to follow us here as we will update you with pictures and news of what is happening on site. The trip will take almost 24 hours, but it will be well worth it. If you would like to know more about the Seaweed Center, please visit http://www.seaweedcenter.com/home.

Altogether we are 26 people going down there, 20 students from CSE, 2 from ICM along with the CSE school manager and a representative from the Encubator. We are told that there is currently no electricity on the island so everything is powered by generators. Hopefully the electricity will come back on soon so that we can perform all the activities we have planned for the Seaweed Center and still keep you up to date.

Through the weeks leading up to this trip, everyone has had their specific tasks to prepare activities that will take place. The first days, we will aid the working women in the village Paje to carry out their daily work activities of collecting Seaweed. We will also hold different workshops with them, from drying the seaweed more efficiently to soap machinery, packaging and sales strategy. However, it is important to remember that we are not there to teach them. From experience, it does not work very well when an outsider comes to show them how everything should be. We have at least as much to learn from them, about their culture and the art of soapmaking as they have from us. Therefore, this whole trip and all the activities and workshops will be an experience where we will all learn together.

Erik from the CSE class is alredy on site preparing for our arrival. The weather is 30-40 degrees warm with constant sun. It will be nice with a change from the unusually snowy and cold Sweden! I must now get myself to school to pack all the toys we are bringing for the children to play with at the Seaweed Center. I will leave you with a pic of the construction site as it was a week ago. Check the blog out soon again to see how everything is progressing!

/Markus

We´re Happy and We´re Moving Forward!

The students of ICM'11 have now come back from a well deserved Christmas Holiday and the project is running at full speed. A lot of activities are driven by the different teams that the organization has been divided in. I am sure that you will here a lot from them in the future but here a brief introduction of the activities are presented.

SMF Forum
SMF 2.0 is one of the activities that will be carried out in order to raise funds for the ICM11 school project. SMF 2.0 is a one-day forum, targeting small and medium sized technically oriented companies. The purpose is to provide the companies with a possibility to widen their knowledge within certain areas. The 2010 forum will focus on three strategic business areas and will also be an opportunity for networking, inspiration and sharing of knowledge between various industries.
The three strategic business areas covered in SMF 2.0 2010 are:
• Maximizing knowledge utilization
• Expand and develop your value proposition
• Create customer value through your brand

BITE Seminars Version 2
The background behind BITE (“Bolla Idéer om Teknik och Entreprenörskap”)is that estimates show that Sweden will lack 50’000 engineers 2020. Therefore, BITE was started to promote students in middle school and high school to pursue technical educations and also to teach them how to solve problems with an entrepreneurial approach. The concept of BITE is company-sponsored seminars where Chalmers students visit upper secondary classes in Gothenburg and conduct interactive technology and entrepreneurship-based workshops in order to attract more students to engineering educations offered in Swedish Universities. All revenues of these seminars will go directly to the Seaweed Project.

Internet Auctions of Football Jerseys
In order to finance the project the football teams AIK, Djurgårdens IF, GAIS, Gefle IF, Halmstads BK, Häcken, Elfsborg and Trelleborg have agreed to support the Seaweed Center Project by donate jerseys signed members of the teams.

Establish a market and create sales channels
One of the most important areas to develop in order to increase the income for the women working at the Seaweed center is to build a logistic structure for distribution and sales of the soap. A market analysis in order to explore the local and international market has been initiated. Also, a review of the EU regulations has started by the law students in the class.

Creation of legal and company structures
In order for the Seaweed center to be a registered limited company it is required to have established company structures. The law students have had meeting with representatives from a law firm that will support the Seaweed Center pro bono.

That's all for now folks! Thank you for your interest in the Seaweed Center Project!

Viktor
Treasurer

The Solution and Goals with our Project

Continuation Project Activities and Objectives
The overall objective for this project performed by ICM 2011 is to continue the work of developing a long‐term collaborative and consensual development between Chalmers School of Entrepreneurship and the University of Dar es Salaam and the Zanzibar Folk School in the developing nation Tanzania. The project shall create a long term sustainable business model for the Seaweed center by creating legal and financial structures and establishing sales channels and operations. We are also aiming at making the Seaweed center a center for knowledge development for the working women. Those activities will make the Seaweed center self-sustaining, make the women farmers independent and also improve the economic and social welfare for the entire Zanzibar. There are therefore four focus areas for this project:

1. Establish a market and create sales channels
One of the most important areas to develop in order to increase the income for the women working at the Seaweed center is to build a logistic structure for distribution and sales of the soap. The market at Zanzibar is most probably not large enough to meet the production capacity of soap; therefore, the opportunities to distribute the soap both local and international will be examined. More specific goals for this focus area are:
• Carry out a market analysis.
• Create a customer network with start in the west coast of Zanzibar.
• Create an entire supply and demand chain for the Seaweed center soap.
• Make it possible for the women to cut the middle hands by establishing a sales function in connection to the facility.
• Define the target customer segments for the soap and how each customer segment will be reached, i.e. find out how to make the soap attractive to all customers.
• Provide the Seaweed center with a truck to make the distribution of soap possible, both to customers at Zanzibar as well as transport to Stone Town (the main city at Zanzibar), from where it can be further distributed.
• Educate the women in how to sell the soap by carrying out on-site workshops and seminars.
Previous dialogues with the hotels located near the Paje village have shown strong interests in buying the soaps. The initial interviews and analysis made by the students enrolled in the education at Zanzibar Folk School, have shown that the hotels are willing to pay approximately 150 Tsh. / piece of soap with 50 Tsh. in manufacturing cost. This would be a great increase of the amount of turnover and profits due to the large volume.

2. Development of the Operations
In order to secure a certain production capacity of the soap manufacturing and lower the risk of failure for the production, one area that this project will focus on is the operations of the Seaweed center. The daily operational work of the center will be managed by the women farmers and the management for the Seaweed center, but we will develop some of the necessary structures for managing the organization of the manufacturing facility. This includes the following activities:
• Create a system and a payment structure for the seaweed in the drying facility. This is needed since it will be hard to keep track of who owns what seaweed in the facility.
• Development of simple management control tools in Microsoft Excel that can be used for e.g. accounting, sales statistics and to plan purchasing.
• Provide the Seaweed center with a computer that would be used for managing the operational control systems as well as for educational purpose.
• To start up the manufacturing of soap an initial investment is needed in buying raw material from the local market, packaging material etc., and it is therefore a focus area of this project to raise seed money to the Seaweed center. Those money will be used to make the operations running before the soap will bring any revenues to the center.

3. Creation of legal and company structures
In order for the Seaweed center to be a registered limited company it is required to have established company structures. One part of the project will hence focus on using our legal competence in the class and create structures such as:
• Foundation of the company
• Shareholders’ agreement
• Employment contracts

4. Establish the Seaweed center as a knowledge center
To further reinforce the sustainability of the Seaweed center the fourth focus area will be to establish a knowledge center as a part of the Seaweed center. The goal is both to spread our business expertise to the poor women in Paje through on-site workshops but also to create a continuous learning among the women. By having hands‐on workshops with reflection of real‐life situations, the goal is to create an interactive learning process with significant knowledge diffusion. The education will be executed from a sustainable‐development perspective in order to fulfill our overall goal of long‐term sustainability of this project. More specific goals for this focus area are:
• Providing knowledge toys to the children to stimulate the learning process early
• Provide English language education, in close collaboration with the Zanzibar Folk School, for the women to increase their ability to communicate with the tourists coming to the Seaweed center
• Conducting business and entrepreneurial training

The Solution and Previous Project Activities Performed by CSE 2010

The Solution and Previous Project Activities Performed by CSE 2010
The Seaweed project carried out by the class of CSE 2010 is influenced by the seaweed co‐operative in Kidoti (a village located in the northern part of Zanzibar). Through a series of infrastructural, technological and organizational improvements, this co‐operative is now able to produce higher quality seaweed as well as soap from the seaweed, in a socially, environmentally and economic improved way that benefits the whole village. The Seaweed Center project run by the class of CSE 2010 has had the following three main objectives:

1. Working Premise: Manufacturing Facility with Solar Drying Storage Space
In order reduce the significant poverty and the women’s minor influence in the villages in Zanzibar, one of the objectives is to increase the women’s income and strengthen their social position by creating new job opportunities for the women. Through an acquisition of land and construction of a manufacturing building, the women could wake up in the morning and actually go to work. In order to solve the issue regarding the lack of storage space during the rainy seasons, a solar drying storage space has been built in connection to the manufacturing building, which will result in a constant stream of revenue to the women farmers, regardless type of weather. This facility is located near the seaweed cultivations in order to improve the current infrastructural situation where the women must carry the seaweed for long distances.
By selling seaweed and soap in connection to the facility, the class of CSE 2010 also makes it possible for the women to cut the middle hands. The facility will be built near the main road that connects the west and east coast of Zanzibar (which is also in near connection to the ocean). This makes it possible to develop the facility into a significant tourist attraction where the women can sell their products from the facility to the tourists directly.

2. Knowledge Diffusion: Seminars and Workshops On-Site
In order to have a long‐term sustainability for the project and for Zanzibar’s future it is a necessity for the women to learn the basic methods of how to efficient run businesses from a social‐responsible perspective. The learning will appear from well‐developed seminars, lectures and workshops with role plays which simulate and reflect real‐life business applications. Significant demand of increased knowledge within different areas, especially business and entrepreneurship has been expressed not only from the Tanzanian government but also from the local population in Zanzibar. The overall goal with the Seminars and Workshops is to create a consensual, providing and significant learning‐process and knowledge‐diffusion between all the involved parties in the project, but especially between the CSE students and the women seaweed farmers.

3. Alternative Economic Activities: Soap Making Machinery
The third focus of the project has been to create alternative income bringing activities in order to strengthen the economic situation and the individuals’ extreme poverty. In order to compensate the obstacles for cultivate and harvest the higher quality seaweed, the class of CSE 2010 has chosen to increase the women’s product portfolio by installing soap making machinery. The experienced researcher from the Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of Dar es Salaam, Dr. Flower E. Msuya has introduced the class of CSE 2010 to a technique of how to extract and manufacture soap from the harvested seaweed available in Paje. The overall goal is to teach the seaweed farmers how to extract additional value from the seaweed and gain more income on day‐to‐day basis, as well as introduce them to new manufacturing methods that have been proven to be efficient by the Kidoti women.