AHA Bolivia
Positioning a Social Enterprise for Growth
Cochabamba, Bolivia & New York, NY
Social Enterprise, Ethical Manufacturing
December 2013 - September 2014
Using ethical manufacturing to create economic opportunity and preserve culture.
To build a more resilient organization able to meet social impact and profit goals, AHA Bolivia, the ICCO Foundation and I partnered to understand current informal production and communications processes, and to craft a solutions plan.
AHA Bolivia is an ethical manufacturer based in Bolivia, working to provide designers and retailers in the US, Europe, and Asia with high quality, handcrafted knit garments and accessories. The organization holds fair trade production practices and principles at its core and works with local artisans to preserve age-old knitting techniques, using largely local, sustainable fibers. The often contentious political and business environment of Bolivia means that small enterprises like AHA Bolivia must weather policy and trade changes nimbly. Sometimes that means changing internal structures and sometimes that means rallying to secure new clients due to a drop off caused by trade barriers. AHA Bolivia had survived for 15 years, but largely based on ad hoc processes that focused on ‘putting-out-fires’. They needed to understand all the internal challenges they had control over so that they could start creating a more efficient and effective enterprise able to weather changes to keep their artisans employed.
To kick off the project, I conducted in-depth interviews with all key staff members and also collected and reviewed documents and other assets. Based off this data, I built a week-long design thinking and gamestorming workshop that I facilitated with all key staff members in Bolivia. The workshop included values mapping exercises to expose assumptions, process mapping activities to build empathy and discover pain points, and ideation sessions to co-create solutions to the challenges identified.
I participated in some additional remote ideation sessions with more plugged-in key staff members to ensure a diversity of solutions that included technology as well as cross-cultural thinking. I frameworked all of the solutions against a 2x2 matrix and created a plan of action based on the feasibility of each of the quadrants in the matrix.
We launched the prototype phase in Bolivia together and then I remotely coached key staff members responsible for solutions. We had bi-weekly check-in calls to distill learnings and work through additional hurdles. We were able to test all short-term solutions together but additional longer-term ideas were left for staff to test on their own.
I truly appreciated working with Cecilia as she had come from a more formal social business background than I. She was able to clearly identify a process that enabled my staff and artisans to understand the entire business cycle and where they fit in individually. She was also able to help me look at the larger picture and pinpoint the weak links in our overall business. I continue to use her as a point of reference when I am developing new lines of business or changing something about our current business structure. She has been an invaluable resource for me as she strikes a perfect balance between business and philanthropy and has a very clear idea about "doing the right thing". - Anna Aliaga, Founder & CEO
"Working with Cecilia is intriguing. It's engaging to discuss your business' basic assumptions, have them analyzed and challenged and come up with new solutions to both old and current issues." - José Arébalo, Client Manager
