At a bakery in Kinshasa

This morning, we had breakfast in the room. We had omelet, bread and tea. The porridge was missing though, not everyone have understood how to lay a good foundation for the challenges of the day.

At 10 a.m. Dikens drove us to Nestlé’s offices here in Kinshasa, located in an area where many large corporations and banks reside. The Nestlé company operates in 21 countries in equatorial Africa and the African headquarters are situated in Nairobi. They run a broth factory here in Kinshasa, otherwise they import food products into the country at three major delivery locations, Goma, Bumba Shi and Kinshasa. Dr. Franck Otete received and welcomed us. He works with scientific and legal issues at Nestlé. The company is Swiss work and it works with food production and distribution worldwide. Their slogan is “Good Food, Good Life”. Zola, Juliennes daughter is a business economist at the company, and she arranged the contact.

We presented our organization to Franck and spoke specifically about the juice factory we have designed for Luozi. Three necessary conditions are lacking in the Luozi juice projects, namely one or more investors, identification of sources of raw materials and an electricity supply with sufficient capacity. We had a very nice and pleasant conversation with Franck. He was obviously interested and promised to raise the issue with engineers and business economists in the company. He was also interested in our entrepreneurial training and the innovations we are trying to introduce in the country. And we expressed our ambitions to establish cooperation with businesses and industry, as well as with politicians and authorities.

When we told him that we were from Sweden, he told us that he has three sisters who live in Stockholm. He is well aware of Karolinska Sjukhuset (a hospital in Stockholm) and the research performed there, but even though he is very interested in Sweden he has never come to go there. When he asked about our references, we could refer to the CEC Church. The church itself is a result of the cooperation between Swedish missionaries and the Congolese. And the reason why we came to Bas-Congo has it’s cause in the Swedish Mission Church’s mission to this area. We told him that we now benefit from the CEC Church as we, in many respects, work within it. It will be interesting to see what this contact may result in.

At 5 p.m. we had a meeting with the family Nyambudi and the Nsanda Group. The project is taking shape and it is necessary that the whole family is involved and that everyone pulls their weight. Without hard work there won’t be any results. The family consists of mother Julienne, daughters Nina, Zola, Emma and son Tutondele and his wife Aimérance. At the moment, the father Clemence is in Nsanda where he manages the agriculture. We went through the various tasks of the upcoming harvest of cassava and the efforts required of each one.

Before bedtime, we had one more briefing to do. It was about the solar lights. Sales are too slow and they must be accelerated in order for the business to be profitable. There seem to be some measures to get a quicker sale.