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Mercomujer, which focuses on women's cooperatives, has a goal
of creating more non-subsistence jobs for rural women in Peru. It
also wants to find ways to get these women working at jobs that will
get them closer in wages to working men in their particular regions.
The project the Global Consulting Practicum team worked on had
women in several villages spread out through Peru hand-making
knitted dolls and other somewhat sophisticated paper and cloth
items. Most of the women also had family and farming duties, so
their work hours were inconsistent, most often depending on when
they were needed otherwise by their families. The products themselves,
said Lin, were good, but Mercomujer could never quite get a
consistency in inventory or know exactly when the workers would
show up.
"That is a real challenge with a non-profit that we learned," said
Lin. "You have to get them to think like a business. You spend an
awful lot of energy with a non-profit that way which you probably
wouldn't with another kind of business.
"But then, you are not only analyzing things, but working with
a cause," she said. "What was interesting is that there was a nexus
between environmental concerns, women's concerns, business,
and a host of other things. McKinsey and other firms do pro bono
work, sure, but here you are out there making a difference."
In the end, the GCP students advised Nolte and Mercomujer
to concentrate on the high-end and "organic" market in the United
States. There are a lot of buyers of crafts, they said, who look for
natural fibers and things made by local artisans for gifts or show
items. In addition, the students also tried to show Nolte and her
workers about nuts-and-bolts aspects of a business, everything from
accounting and time-management to figuring out with a system
how to know just when each worker would come and how much
she would produce. Nolte said she is grateful that she found the
GCP students, that she hopes it will be a turnaround for her work
and for other non-profits around Latin America.
"We're improving our financial forms, and we will start working
with the organic marketplace, which was one of the most important
recommendations," said Nolte. "We had a team that understood
the benefits and difficulties of an enterprise with social
responsibility from the marketing and financial perspective."
For most of the for-profit Global Consulting Practicum projects,
the firms want the student teams in for a stated time with a
stated consulting purpose, fitting quite well within the five months
or so allotted for the course. But for the Mercomujer project, the
students have decided to stay on to see how they can help on an on-going basis.
"When you work with a non-profit, you get really into it.
You get an intrinsic emotion. It grows itself organically," said Lin.
"When we first got there, they didn't know if they were making
a profit on products or not. Were they charging enough for their
product? We asked them about capacity and they didn't know what
capacity was. They were dealing with eight different communities
and each has subcommunities with different holidays and farming
schedules.
"But that was the exciting thing. The GCP provided us with a
real-life situation, not just some classroom work," she said. "It will
be great to help our partners succeed long after the project itself
is over."
Freelance writer Robert Strauss is a frequent contributor to the
Wharton Alumni Magazine.
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