Sustainable Development Project Kenya - Step 1&2

Step 1&2 of the tailor's Sustainable Development Project 

Define the problem, current perceived causes, challenges and constraints, common practices, and desired outcomes. Determine common practices and the presence of PD individuals or groups.

The first step is discussing whether the group has a problem serious enough to tackle. If yes they continue with generating or reviewing data that measures the magnitude of the problem. In the tailor shop's case they discussed how many orders they usually have per month and throughout the year.

Then they discussed what are the problems they face and what is their goal for the tailor shop. The problems they identified at first were concerning the lack of capital, orders, customers, material stock and daily work. Their main goal is to have a successful and sustainable tailor shop which implies:

• To have work daily throughout the year;

• To obtain capital to expand our business;

• To get regular customers throughout the year;

• To have a various material stock for our clients;

• To advertise the product we offer; 

• To create a quality team;

• To find various and regular orders throughout the year;

• To offer quality products to our customers.

The second step is to identify what are the common practices of the tailor shop, how is the shop working today in order to explore the issues impacting the problems and current behavioral norms. The tailors determined what everyone is doing today and documented the current working condition.

Once the common practices are identified, the tailor discussed what they knew of uncommon behaviors in other tailoring workshops in the community. To help them identify those I asked the group the following questions:

- Do you know successful tailor shops in Shianda? Shops that have orders all year long and can sustain themselves with their shop only. 

- Do these tailor shops have the same resources as you? Meaning: they come from Shianda, and became successful in Shianda without using outside help/resources. 

- How are these workshops successful? 

- What do they do to have orders? How?

- What do they do differently than you?

With these inquiries answered and highlighted, the tailors already have a better idea of the direction they want their shop to take, the problems they need to solve and the awareness that they will have to change some of their working behaviors to make that happen.