For the past two years our small team has been learning about business best practices and talking with business owners in the local Machakos area to assess the needs and challenges that they face. Here are some of the top challenges and gaps we have discovered so far in our research:

• Shortage of reliable employees
• Unwillingness to share knowledge (ie. Not following the W. Edwards Deming concept.)
• Business leadership that is not helping employees grow or obtain a sustainable level of pay
• Everyone wants to start their own business. This leads to a lack of collaboration and misses the opporutnity to leverage invidual strengths and build a team that is stronger together
• Use of technology - Technology seems to be present, but often is not being leveraged to add value to business practice
• Lack of business strategy
• Lack of focus on products, services, and solutions that are meeting current needs of customers, community, and economy
• Language barriers - although the majority of the residents in Machakos have no trouble communicating with one another, the country's array of languages are comprised of many tribal languages and dialects along with Swahili and English as national languages. This can lead to some language barriers and can also come into play when businesses want to engage with foreign countries/customers

We are working to close these gaps through...

• Education to leverage business best practices - seminars, webinars, training resources, etc.
• Mentorship and Accountability
• Collaboration on technology solutions and innovation
• Networking top entrepreneurs, business managers, and thought leaders
• Challenging businesses toward top performance
• Training and mentoring employees and workers to develop required skills and work ethics