Lunch with a Millionaire

In September 2007 Channel 4 run an interesting documentary that had many Ugandans and others glued to the their Televisions, no this was not BIG BROTHER, well that was my view anyway but some journalists whose job it is to review the previous night's TV programmes thought it was , in fact they were amazed that the CH 4 had spelt the programme title correctly with punctuation in the correct space.

The programme was called "MILLIONAIRES' MISSION". http://www.channel4.com/news/microsites/A/africa/ Channel 4 teamed up with an NGO called World Vision and challenged 8 UK based millionaires to use their entrepreneurial skills to come up with ideas that would help a remote village in South West Uganda lift itself out of poverty. Ironically my visit to this part of Uganda on 31 December 2006 led to the birth of Ethnic Supplies, like the Millionaires featured in the programmes I was blown away by the beauty of this part of Uganda but shocked by the poverty and struggles of day to day people. Women carry water up very steep hills, children lose classroom time to carrying water from the bottom of the hill to the top where the school is located but they do their best to survive through subsistence farming and selling handicrafts to the odd tourist. As a visitor/tourist you wake up to the most amazing views over the hills and valleys, mist, lush vegetation, then they are the gorillas as well as the beautiful lake and as Deidre of the Millionaires put it "who needs Ibiza when you can come to Uganda?"

By the end of the programme they had come up with practical solutions for the villagers to work with that became successful. The message seemed to be one of the ideas have to be arrived at by the locals to ensure sustainability and ownership. One of the ideas was to help women weavers in the village find a market for their baskets and by the end of the programme they had succeeded and earned £200. In a village where the weekly income is £0.09pence this was a fortune. At the end of this particular episode I got in touch with the people associated with the programme and they put me in touch with the group in Uganda and my representative there met up with them and we have since added their baskets to our collection.

At the time I was unaware that the Surrey Chamber of Commerce has a very good working relationship with one of the Millionaire by the name of Shahid Azeem. So it was that when the Chamber issued their Winter programme I noticed that Shahid was going to be the guest speaker at the Xmas lunch at Losely park, I registered promptly. The lunch was yesterday 12 December 2007 and what a treat! Losely as a setting is an amazing place. Shahid told us about his journey from very humble beginnings to wealth and his time in Uganda. He filled in all the gaps of what we didn't see and brought us up to date with some of the people that the group worked with, specifically that a young man with minimal electrical knowledge was enabled to set up an Enterprise that has seen him rise to a solar power specialist in the region so much so that he now exports these panels to Sudan.

Shahid said something that resonated with me, "Grants/aid doesn't work and if you want to make a change you have to work at the grass roots, that's where you can see actual results, the second point was that people in Africa are just looking for opportunities to earn a living and are not just waiting for hand outs" Corruption is a problem in places and gets in the way of real and effective change.