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The millionaire who says Africa means business
Can a multi-millionaire British entrepreeur solve the problems of a remote Aftican village?
SHE started her business in a DSS bedsit in Leeds, with a small grant and a big idea. When she needed more space but couldn't afford to pay rent, she swapped her teaching skills for the use of a couple of disused classrooms at a local school.
So Deirdre Bounds knows what it's like to start off very small – although her business didn't stay that way for long.
Building on its founder's extensive experience in teaching English as a foreign language, the company i-to-i eventually grew to teach 15,000 people a year how to teach English abroad.
It then led the "gap year" explosion, finding work placements with development projects overseas for young people, also providing them with accommodation and local support.
She's a visionary with a clear talent for marketing and absolute belief in the adage that travel expands the mind. A strong streak of Scouse wit might have fooled a few people along the way that she is lightweight; 20m in the bank from the sale of her business says she's had the last laugh.
She admits her own ambition surprised her. But, after 12 years gazing intently down a tunnel while she grew her entrepreneurial seed into a serious worldwide contender, she decided to step back and look for something else. She realised that the real buzz for her is in nurturing an idea and making it grow.
Step forward Channel 4 television, which commissioned a series of four programmes following eight multimillionaire business people as they
travelled to a small community in rural Uganda with a mission to improve its economy with sustainable development ideas.
The eightsome, whose fields ranged from construction to radio, PR, weddings, pubs, IT and media, had to make do with tents, a camp fire and fetching water from a spring a mile way, as they camped out for three and a half weeks at Nykasiru in rural south-western Uganda, close to the Rwandan border.
With a combined fortune of 600m, and a few large egos to match their wealth, the entrepreneurs were asked by the development organisation WorldVision to come up with projects that would help this poor community to stand on its own feet.
The village needed to move forward, rather than continuing to subsist on potatoes, a few goats and chickens, hand-outs from charities or intervention by non-government organisations. Each of the entrepreneurs in this enterprise pledged 15,000 to improve life in the village.
"The average daily wage there is 50p, children leave school at 12 to work in the fields, and nothing at all entrepreneurial was going on in the village," says Deirdre. "Our challenge started with listening to what people wanted, think about whether those projects could be sustainable, then use our expertise to get ideas off the ground, with the community helping us.
"I said yes immediately to the whole thing because I felt I might be able to make a difference, and honestly, how often do you get to sit around a fire under the stars and find out about other people's ideas and their stories?"
The village comprises 1,000 inhabitants in two parishes strung across two hills. The landscape is lush, but Nykasiru is off the beaten track – despite being geographically very close to the region made famous by the film Gorillas in the Mist.
Expectations among the community were high when Deirdre and her colleagues arrived. Their wish list included renovations to the health centre, where many patients had to sleep on the floor; bringing in a water supply, improving the road, renovating the school and buying books, repairing the ambulance and building a technical school.
A TV crew of 53 (yes, 53) followed the team's efforts as they set about trying to make something happen in a country where, generally, the speed of progress is agonisingly slow.
Construction tycoon Steve Morgan seemed to decide from the start that his pet project would be the re-routing of water to the village school, so that children did not have to miss two hours of lessons a day in order to make a dangerous journey back and forth to the bottom of the valley with water carriers.
All projects were supposed to be agreed by the whole team, but when the rest of the group objected that Steve's brainwave would not stimulate the local economy, he admitted he wasn't a team player and and decided to go it alone.
Channel 4 have, with Millionaires' Mission, come up with a great vehicle for airing and illustrating the problems of much of Africa. As WorldVision's Rudo Kwaramba tells the entrepreneurs: "The idea isn't simply to provide handouts but to identify projects that will benefit the community in the long-term, not just individuals right now. It's important to make the distinction between relief and development."
The sentiment is worthy, but as one of the team finds, it's impossible not to hand out a few pounds to the mother of a sick and skeletal baby when that is probably all it takes to make her better.
Deirdre Bounds and media mogul Seb Bishop propose attracting tourism by earmarking 8,000 for the development of a tourist hotel to sleep up to 11 guests in a disused school building.
Volunteers would pay upwards of 800 to stay there for a minimum of four weeks, while teaching English to village children. Any profits would go into other projects in the village. Seb and Deirdre advertise on the local radio station and find a co-ordinator for the hotel in Mr Hannington a local church warden.
Villagers are also roped in to build a potato store, so that local farmers can lay aside excess potatoes to sell at a higher price out of season. Initial enthusiasm temporary dries up, though, when the local manpower downs tools on the discovery that the building is to be a cheaper traditional mud structure, rather than the much more expensive brick.
By the time the eight entrepreneurs return to the UK, some of their plans are up and running, and others are still work-in-progress. Steve Morgan has left to do a deal back in the UK, with his school water project not-quite finished. However, since his return he has set about providing mains water to about 3,500 inhabitants of the valley around Nykasiru.
Shahid Azeem, an IT multimillionaire, has ordered a new ambulance and overseen the electrification of the local maternity unit, so that babies will no longer be born by candlelight. A cooperative of local basket-weaving women has found a buyer for their wares.
But the proof of the whole project would be whether the team would return three months later and find progress had been made or that the spirit of enterprise had not infected the local community enough to pick up the ball and run with it.
"When we went back, the potato store was up and running, with 35 sacks of potatoes in there and a buyer found for them," says Deirdre. "The TeachInn hotel was almost complete, and the first guests, students from Leeds Metropolitan University, were due to arrive.
"We all pitched in to finish things off and when they arrived they were really pleased with the place. By that stage we had six months' worth of bookings, giving the village a profit of about 15,000 for the year.
"A local woman who ran a little shop had opened a bar to cater for the visitors. We've given the project a year, to see if the locals can welcome visitors effectively, and if all's well we hope there
will be a second TeachInn in another village." Bookings for TeachInn Uganda are handled through a not-for-profit arm of i-to-i.
Unfortunately, the lights went out in the maternity unit not long after they were switched on. The local authority simply hasn't paid the bill. Much to Shahid's disappointment, the wrong ambulance was delivered, an inferior one to the model he'd spent a large chunk of the budget on. In any case, no-one accepts responsibility for servicing it and putting fuel in it. Both of his pet projects involved a healthcare system that was in complete disarray.
Apart from memories that include vast starry skies, the drum that wakens the village, the welcome dance performed by local women and the goodbye feast of a freshly-slaughtered cow, what has Deirdre Bounds taken from her Ugandan experience?
"The belief that, given the chance, there are as many entrepreneurial people there as there are here. And the conviction that it's trade, not aid, that can really change things."
Millionaires' Mission will start on Channel 4 at 9pm on Wednesday, September 19.
For information about volunteering holidays in Uganda see www.teachinnuganda.com or call 0870 333 2332.
Deirdre Bounds's company, i-to-i, is launching an annual nationwide competition challenging budding entrepreneurs aged 16-18 to come up with new ideas to solve developmental problems overseas. The winner will be sent abroad for four weeks to implement their idea, with 500 start-up budget and the full backing of i-to-i. Details of the competition will be posted at www.i-to-i.com/mission-gap .
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