Sustainable Development Project with a community tailor shop in rural Kenya

My name is Sophie, I am an EUAV with Mondo and WEFOCO in Shianda village, Western Kenya. I am a fashion designer and a tailoring/entrepreneurship teacher working on the sustainable development of a rural community tailor shop. 

The WEFOCO tailor shop has a team of 10 tailors coming from several community groups working with WEFOCO around Shianda village. 

The aim of this project is to work together on making this tailor shop self-sufficient and sustainable in order to generate a stable income for the tailors and their community groups as well as create opportunities for more people in the community. 

The shop has four sewing machines, an embroidery machine and a TS-printing machine which makes it an ambitious ground for income generating and skills training. WEFOCO and Mondo with the help of volunteers have been working on improving this tailor shop for a few years. It has been a long and difficult process and in October 2020 Mondo decided to send a volunteer to work specifically on this project to give it a boost and understand, with the current tailors,  what is their goal and how do they see their community tailor shop situation today and in the future. 

When I arrived in October, the tailor shop didn't really have a specific team. The shop had been working on uniforms from October to January for years but the rest of the year they didn't really have regular orders. So it was only working full time during these three months per year.

I knew coming on the project that the main obstacles to the tailor shop's growth were: lack of team work and ownership, lack of capital and material, tailoring quality and respecting order delays needed improvements, lack of initiative taking and motivation. 

As I observed and questioned the tailors and the other parties involved about all of these during my first month here, I realized that there were a lot more things to be understood and talked about between all of them concerning the shop organisation as a whole. Regular communication between those parties on these topics was also something to be worked on with other problems such as rules, roles, income and activity tracking, community groups involvement, goals and ambitions, market strategies...

It all seemed like a lot to handle at once...

I had read a book on sustainable development in communities facing "unsolvable" problems called "The power of positive deviance - How unlikely innovators solve the world's toughest problems" by Richard Pascale, Jerry and Monique Sternin about a year ago. 

I knew the moment I read that book that I wanted to try their approach in my professional life someday. 

Sustainability, the complete involvement of the people I work for/with in every thing we plan and implement as well as the belief of giving a holistic view to all participants of a project have been for years something I value in my work. 

When I faced the tailor shop's challenges and obstacles during my observation phase, it became clear to me that this was a perfect ground for us to try using this Positive Deviance Approach. 

What is the Positive Deviance Approach? 

In short the PD approach is a problem solving approach planned and implemented 100% by the beneficiaries of a project. It is facilitated by someone who knows and explains the approach, brings people together and guides the participants throughout the whole process. 

There are five steps to this approach: 

1. Define the problem, current perceived causes, challenges and constraints, common practices, and desired outcomes.

2. Determine common practices and the presence of PD individuals or groups.

3. Discover uncommon but successful behaviors and strategies through inquiry

and observation. Outside work.

4. Design activities to allow community members to practice the discovered

behaviors.

5. Monitor and evaluate the resulting project or initiative which further fuels

change by documenting and sharing improvements as they occur, and help the

community discern the effectiveness of the initiative.

The approach also follows these Motos:

• “Don’t do anything about me without me”

• “Act your way into a new way of thinking rather than think your way into a new way of acting.”

• Focus on the “HOW” instead of the “WHAT” and “WHY” 

• Able to opt in and out of the project.

In the book, the experts explain how they implemented this approach in communities facing big and challenging problems such as childhood malnutrition in a village in Vietnam, female circumcision in Egypt or MRSA infections in American hospitals for example.

I thought if it worked in such huge and difficult situations and communities it could also work for a smaller project like the tailor shop.

So together with the tailors, after we built a team with regular tailors and new tailors interested in the community tailor shop, we started working on this approach.

And I am telling you: "Oh how an interesting journey it is for all of us."

Stay tuned if you want to read about how we have gone through all the steps and what is coming out of it.

Check out these pictures for a preview of the hard working team: