Sole Comfort Dot-Com: Bridging the global income gap through hard work, quality sandals, and ICTs

Author : Becky Wachera and Matthew Meyer
Date added : 2002-04-14

Brief Project Background

The Project started in 1995 when an American and a Kenyan, both in their early 20s, believed that the world market could offer slum dwellers opportunities to lift themselves out of absolute material poverty. With an approximately $2000 grant, the two started making sandals and attempted to market them in Nairobi and, where possibly, around the world. After six years struggling simply to survive, the Project went online at Ecosandals.com. The incorporation of the Internet, first as a marketing and sales tool and more recently as a more comprehensive educational and business tool, rapidly transformed the small shantytown project. Revenues from sales currently provide employment to 33 Kenyans in a fast-paced business environment where quality sandal-making skill, reliability, computer literacy, and creativity are at a premium. We are a shantytown project with a marketable product. For years that product could have sold for highly cherished dollars abroad. Without the Internet, however, the Project could barely survive. With it, we are thriving.

Ten years ago Matthew Meyer was a student who believed something was wrong with our world for people to live this way. Benson Wikyo was a young Kenyan who lived "that way". With initial capital from a small Samuel Huntington Fund seed grant, Meyer and Wikyo worked to build a community-owned business that was self-supporting through sales. With minimal sales, however, the business struggled to survive. In 1998, the young Wikyo - like so many with whom he had worked in Korogocho - died suddenly of a curable illness. With a second grant of $1500, the Project was re-constituted and re-started in Wikyo''s memory. Within a month of the 2001 Ecosandals.com launch, the Korogocho sandal-makers were receiving email messages and orders from around the globe. The Project grew six-fold and now employs nine young mothers in addition to 18 young men, providing them with a steady income. All sandal-makers have access to the Internet and are involved in directly marketing the sandals to customers globally. One online customer brought two Korogocho residents to Canada for business training. We have not yet spent a single shilling or penny on marketing, and yet thousands around the world now proudly wear durable tire sandals, footwear with a uniquely attractive look that is sure to last three years or 3000 miles.

We are a Project started not by two people nor by $2000, but by the hard work and creativity of Korogocho residents themselves, combined with the incredible power of ICTs today.

The Wikyo Akala Project is a community-based dot-com story that is on its way up, not out. Throughout Kenya, Korogocho is known as a rough place. Few there have jobs. Violence is rampant. Quality health care is non-existent. Shelter is dilapidated and very temporary. It is a place where most Kenyans fear to walk even during the daytime. Roselyne is one of approximately 400,000 residents of Korogocho slums. Two years ago, she would wake up each morning and set out in search of some way to earn money. Many days she would collect the few coins available, go to the local shantytown market to buy vegetables and attempt to resell them in the area closer to her home. Other days she would make food to sell to casual workers around construction sites. She never had formal employment and had little education. She really had nowhere to go and little to do but tried to achieve her singular goal each day, each week, each year: to find enough money to keep her family alive and, where possible, keep her five children in school. But food was expensive. Quality medical care was never affordable, nor was decent shelter. The few dollars it took to pay each of her children's tuition was often too much for Roselyne. Like many of her Korogocho peers, it was only in her luckiest day that she would bring home as much as 80 Kenyan shillings ($1).

At the same time Roselyne struggled, millions of residents of San Francisco, Stockholm, and Sydney would spend billions of dollars purchasing shoes each year. The Wikyo Akala Project sought to tap into only a tiny fraction of that market for the sole benefit of Roselyne and her many neighbours. Over the past 18 months, the Project has found its success formula in incorporating ICTs into an otherwise struggling small community-owned business. Last year, with revenues generated from skyrocketing Internet sales, the Wikyo Akala Project trained Roselyne to produce sandals and to use computers. Like 26 other Project sandal-makers, she now makes a living wage by designing, producing, marketing and selling sandals globally through Ecosandals.com.

In 1995, a Kenyan and an American started the Wikyo Akala Project with approximately $2000. The two believed that individuals like Roselyne should not be forced to live in dilapidated huts without access to clean water, quality education, or decent shelter. The two young students dreamed that one day the poorest of shantytown dwellers would have access to markets and be able to produce and sell quality goods providing direct, immediate, and substantial reward for hard work. Nothing would be free. Through their own hard work, shantytown dwellers would have an opportunity to transform their own lives.

For six years following its founding, the Project struggled to survive, often with only five part time employees. The Project's source of funding was sales, not donations, and the Project simply did not have access to its targeted markets. Sleek and durable sandals produced primarily from recycled tires had a potentially large market along the California coast or perhaps at New South Wales beaches. Finding avenues to market the sandals to customers ten kilometres from Korogocho, in downtown Nairobi, was virtually impossible. Doing so outside of Kenya was an unimaginable pipe dream. It was difficult just to make a phone call from one side of Nairobi to another. Communicating to customers abroad would take weeks or months. Finding such customers was impossible.

Korogocho residents also only understood the recycled tire sandals, their traditional sandals, to be the sandals worn by the poorest of the poor. Once someone from Korogocho has enough money, they buy "real" shoes. The akala tire sandals were Kenyan products, made from re-used material, which meant products of little value. Through 2000, the Wikyo Akala Project was barely able to sell enough sandals to survive, and most involved with the Project hardly understood why anyone would ever want to buy the sandals anyway.

In February 2001, the online debut of Ecosandals.com changed everything. Hours after the site's launch, it had been viewed on six continents, and the orders in the first week nearly doubled all orders the Project had received in the prior six months. Within months the Project grew six-fold. The Project premiered globally with a ten minute CNN profile and continues to receive coverage in both the Kenyan and American media. The Internet and a creative community business transformed a struggling community-owned project into a fast-growing and self-sustaining community inspiration. In its first year online, without spending even a single shilling advertising - simply through word of mouth - the Project's revenues increased an astounding 25 times.

Today, every one of the 27 sandal-makers understands how a couple thousand dollars, a few creative minds, and information and communication technologies are transforming one of the materially poorest communities on earth.

As orders increased and revenues jumped and an increasing number of people visited the Project's Korogocho workshop, individuals like Rosylyne began to see their own lives in a different light. Roselyne, previously a mother of five children struggling to provide the basic necessities, became Roselyne the Webizen, an Internet user who designs and produces quality footwear products and markets them to other Internet users worldwide.

Results

In spite of worldwide acclaim and the Project's tremendous success in incorporating ICTs to impact lives, the dream of radically transforming the lives of all families residing in Korogocho remains a distant one. The problems in Korogocho are large, and the situation is often dire. For the 27 sandal-makers, however, this is a happy story, a story of a growing number of people, among the most materially poor on earth, who are learning to address their basic needs by gaining access to ICTs and incorporating high technology skills into their daily lives, in spite of the many challenges they face each day. For most of Korogocho, the Project still has a long way to go. To the sandal-makers, the Project provides a quality wage, an interesting workplace where workers are encouraged to think creativity, an educational setting giving adults unique opportunities to learn, and a sense of dignity and self-worth that otherwise is extremely rare in Korogocho and its environs.

At its most basic level, the Project seeks to provide quality employment to Korogocho residents for a livable wage. The Project is not about making or utilizing new technologies. It is about doing all those things as means of building personal dignity. ICTs are merely the vehicle for achieving those goals.

First, the Project recruits adults who are eager to work hard, whether male or female, young or old, regardless of ethnicity. New sandal-makers first enter an intensive three-month sandal training program, after which they become full sandal-makers. During that three-month period, Korogocho residents are taught that nothing is free in the Project. The global commercial nature of the Project dictates that sandal-makers must produce something of global commercial value to derive personal value from the Project. It is a true meritocracy, one that is common in global commercial settings but not so common in the Korogocho marketplace. The sandal-maker and the Project can succeed in an online environment only if they can produce great footwear. Internet customers will judge our sandals only by its quality, and during the training period experienced Project sandal-makers introduce their Korogocho peers to a sandal-making environment that rewards hard work and efficient, high quality production. Sandal-makers are entitled to a 30% share of all Project profits.

In addition to selling sandals online, sandal-makers have unique opportunities to communicate directly with customers around the world. They produce the bi-monthly Korogocho Times newsletter, now sent to an estimated 55 countries, which includes information about what it is like to live in the Korogocho shantytowns, as well as various attempts to increase web traffic and, ultimately, sell sandals. The Times offers our sandal-making writers a forum for global publishing while giving a truly hands-on opportunity to market their products internationally. Michael Karuri, for example, understands how a well-written Times, with creative sales techniques, can translate into benefits for our sandal-makers. Last May Karuri was the profiled sandal-maker in the Times. Three months later, after a Halifax, Nova Scotia sandal customer read the profile, Karuri spent a month of intensive business training in Canada. As Karuri recently stated, "I learned in Canada that the Korogocho Times is not only important to sell sandals. We are teaching people about us, about our country, our communities, and our lives." To Karuri and a growing number of sandal-makers, questions of development and under-development are turned upside-down as they find themselves as educators to the outside world. They are often teachers as they sit in front of a computer in Kenya, communicating with a customer or Internet surfer anywhere in the world who just happened to come across Ecosandals.com.

Both for the sake of the Project and the benefit of all individuals who participate in it, the Project developed an informal education programme. All sandal-makers learn basic English, Math, and computer skills and have periodic trainings on relevant health, business, and finance issues. The demands of a global project often require higher levels of education than the Kenyan system offered Project participants. Informal education attempts to fill that gap, to enable participants to correspond in a higher quality manner with friends abroad and to more effectively promote the sandals online.

Three years ago, Joel would have little choice but to idle around, while he watched some of his peers sift through rubbish at the nearby Mukuru dumping ground simply to find anything of value, anything to help provide the daily bread, often contemplating doing the same. Kiprono would consider earning some desperately needed cash by joining his friends in petty, and often armed, robbery. Today, both Joel and Kiprono are paid a livable wage to design, produce, and sell sandals, while corresponding with a few of the Project's thousands of customers around the world. Sandal-making has developed pride and confidence among Project participants. But the incorporation of ICTs has enabled the sandal-makers not only to make a livelihood, but also to build dignity. Sandal-makers communicate with American and Australian, South African and Swedish customers, who often compliment the sandal-makers on their fine work and occasionally offer design suggestions for the sandals' improvement. It is an unprecedented bridge across oceans and nationalities, across race and class, that provides much more than daily bread.

Lessons

Starting a self-sustaining community business in one of the most materially destitute and violent neighbourhoods in Nairobi, Kenya with minimal initial funding has not always been easy. Our success hinges on our ability to look inward, rather than outward, in building a top notch Project. Though ICTs are the very cornerstone of the Project's success, ICTs are not all good all the time. For us, our formula to effective use of ICTs is structuring the Project offline so that going online will be of greater use. Three principals shape our success and serve as the basis for any advice: creativity, commitment and fun.

A creative environment means more than simply encouraging new ideas. The availability of information globally benefits the Project and such availability pervades all aspects of the Project's activities. More information, we believe, leads to better creativity. Sandal-makers are encouraged to correspond with customers and look at marketing studies on both positive and negative aspects of customer's reactions to sandal products. Sandal-makers meet regularly and are encouraged to present their ideas for improvement of all aspects of the Project. The Project competes with more than simply Nairobi shoe stores. It competes for customers with every shoe store around the world. The only route to success is if we can constantly improve by encouraging everyone, both inside and outside the Project, to contribute their ideas. The Project has survived on the basis of its members creativity, as improved sandal styles have been produced every six months for each of the last four years. Sandal-makers learn, and we encourage them to solve problems in all areas of their lives by bringing new ideas to old problems.

Commitment to the Project takes place on two different levels, institutionally and personally. The first five years were most difficult for the Project. In 1998, three years after its founding, the Project's co-founder and director, Benson Wikyo died. The Project ceased operations for several months. But the commitment of a few of Wikyo's friends kept the Project alive. For the three years he worked with the Project, Wikyo was never able to earn a quality wage. He stayed committed to the Project's ideals, however, and the re-naming of the Project in his memory commemorated the personal commitment that we all serve to emulate. At times, that commitment involves working late on a Sunday night to fill a large export order that requires immediate fulfillment. Other times it means a commitment to multi-ethnic recruitment, insuring that the Project is not plagued by the politics of tribe that has destroyed so many good ideas before ours. The global marketplace demands a perfection of sorts, a fine-tuning of handmade products that we constantly yearn to achieve. That requires an extraordinary level of commitment, albeit a level necessary if we are to prove our worth throughout the sandal world.

In approaching some of the most dire problems of health, illiteracy and other basic necessities, we have found fun to be a necessary part of work. We are all much more willing to work harder to address problems of the Korogocho community, to work long hours making quality footwear, if we are having fun. It gives us a sense of humanity, purpose and belonging as we share in the fruits of labour. Work is not always fun, but joking, singing, and occasionally even dancing throughout the workday does help everyone to keep their heads held high and accurately present a sandal-maker population that is not only working hard but also smiling quite a bit.

The major barriers we face are often outside of our control. Exportation costs, telecommunications limitations, and community violence all limit our potential as a Project. The cost of export, for example, dramatically reduces the amount we can compensate our sandal-makers for their hard work. With export costs reduced 50%, for example, we could increase sandal-maker wages 20%. Similarly, we often dream that we could have the telecommunications infrastructure that our customers have. Simply going online is costly, and, in comparison with most of those we communicate with, our connections are slow. And when we walk into Korogocho after work, particularly late in the evening, safety is a major concern. Our sandal-makers somehow can complete a large sandal sale to a customer in Pullman, Washington, but many of those same sandal-makers cannot manage to walk safely 500 metres from the workshop to their homes.

If we started this Project in a perfect world, we would not need our Project. We have no real strategy to confront these problems in a long-term manner, except to continue being creative, committed, and having fun to try to solve them. We also hope, we dream, that somewhere among our sandal-makers, maybe just one among them, sits the person who will one day revolutionize the Kenyan exportation industry. Maybe just one sandal-maker will work up through our Project and become the telecommunications expert who transforms the Kenyan infrastructure. Perhaps just one of our current sandal-making trainees is going to somehow bring peace to the streets and alleyways of Korogocho. We see problems all around us, problems that caused the Project's founding seven years ago. But we also believe that the solutions may be among us.

Development Impacts

The Project addresses poverty using the Internet and the creative hands and minds of some of the most materially poor young adults on earth. The young adults all of whom have dropped out of school for lack of fees, would otherwise spend much time picking through trash dumps seeking anything of value. Instead, residents who join the Project are put to work, developing and making enhanced used-tire sandals, while learning basic computer, math and language skills as well as online marketing. Sandal-makers earn a minimum of 30% of profit on each sandal sale. As a single pair of sandal sells online for as much as 1600 shillings ($20), 30% of profits makes a serious impact on the life of sandal-makers like Roselyne.

The Project is not just about development for the people of Korogocho, though. The ICT nature of the Project turns the very calculus of development upside down. Korogocho residents operate in an online world where they produce and sell quality footwear, author a newsletter that is sent across the world, and correspond with and educate customers sitting in more developed nations. The consequence is sandal-makers leaving work each day as "the helpers" and customers abroad reading their email messages as "the helped". What our sandal-makers have begun to recognize is that globalization need not be just about the big multi-national corporation that dominates, educates and dictates to the little developing country. It also can be about the little multi-national corporation dictating terms of sale to customers in far more developed settings.

The Project attempts to develop Kenya based on the efforts of Kenyans. We approach development as a problem that is solvable within the hearts, hands and minds of Korogocho residents. Among the hundreds of thousands here who still lack basic shelter, medical care, food security, education, and employment, many understandably do not believe us. But utilizing ICTs, Roselyne and 26 others certainly do.

Project Information

Organisation : Wikyo Akala Project/Ecosandals.com
URL : http://www.ecosandals.com
Total budget in US$ : $32,000
Country of activity: Kenya [KE]

Are there any partners involved : yes
What is partners role?: We currently have partners in North America, Europe, Africa, and Australia. The primary purpose of our partners is to market our sandals to increase sales and generally assist with the logistics of importing and distribution. On a regular basis, they assist us with general marketing, point of sale, and distribution. In addition, our partners help us to network with organizations and groups interested in supporting the business and technology training of our workers. They provided us initial outlets of correspondence and bridge building from Korogocho to the world.

Recently, our partners have begun discussing a coalition to address the basic educational needs of all children in the Korogocho shantytown. Our partners are considering a new, more expansive partnership to offer Korogocho residents high quality, high technology education from their earliest years.

Contact Information

Becky Wachera and Matthew Meyer
becky@ecosandals.com; matt@ecosandals.com
P.O. Box 58188
Nairobi
Kenya

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