On To The Next One...

Ironically, the day that I was going to publish this post, my friend Jim had e-mailed me. He told me to "not be a typical business student" and enjoy my time in Uganda. "Try not to think about a new project so soon," he said.

Interestingly, I have been thinking about new projects - a lot of them! Again, I guess that's the curse of being a business student. You can't help looking around, and noticing challenges and issues that can be solved. Here's one of them I've seen:

Problem: Lack of safe, reliable family planning methods.

I had a long discussion the other day with my host mom about different ways women can practice birth control. She said it was a big problem here because a lot of births are unplanned. You have an uneducated woman and a husband who dominates the household – so of course you’re going to have a lot of unplanned kids.

(Photo of my community, Bugembe)

My host mom said that birth control is available, but there are really complicated side effects. Birth control pills have been known to give people cancer, and there are anti-fertility injections but those also have insane side effects.

I told my host mom that it sounded like all that they needed was access to safe, high quality birth control drugs and she agreed with me. If a company that operated as a social enterprise could come in and offer the same high-quality drugs we have in the U.S. at a lower price, then that would fill a huge market gap and a societal gap.

It would concurrently solve problems in population control, women’s empowerment, and poverty alleviation. And it would satisfy a market gap because of the demand for these products; there’s nothing close in effectiveness here.

Challenges: buying the drugs and being able to sell them at lower prices while still maintaining high profit margins. The business must be sustainable and to do that it has to churn out revenue. Additionally, shipping the drugs halfway across the world? Yipes.

I hope Jim won't be too mad at me about my inability to sit still for too long. Feedback is appreciated - or a cloning device so I can do all these things!