Where did the idea for Alive & Kicking come from?
The enterprise's founder, Jim Cogan, was walking down a street in Tanzania when he saw a man sitting on the side of the road stitching a leather football, he stopped to talk to him, and by the end of their conversation the idea of a ball-making social enterprise in Africa was born.
What do you feel to be Alive & Kicking's greatest achievement?
Our greatest achievement is to exist at all. Market conditions suggest that you can't make balls efficiently enough in Africa to be competitive in the market, especially not if you pay your staff fairly and incorporate charitable objectives into the business model. Balls are made for far less on a massive scale in Pakistan, China and Vietnam, and can be shipped around the world for next to nothing, which makes those suppliers very difficult to compete with.
Against those odds the business has become sustainable, and essential to that has been our ability to differentiate our product by educating our customers about quality and labour conditions in manufacture. We wouldn't have been able to do this if a number of retail outlets hadn't treated us favourably because we're a social enterprise. Nakumatt outlets in Kenya for example have allowed us to enter point of sale ball stands into their shops which tell the story of how our balls are made and separate them from the competition. Nakumatt also retail our balls with a reduced margin which aids in our price competitiveness.
What is your personal greatest professional achievement?
My greatest professional achievement is probably the part I've played in changing the focus of Alive & Kicking towards operating more as a business than as a charity, which I believe will stand it in good stead in the long run. More than anything else, the change has been in the way the staff view their own organisation. At our Zambian operation in particular, a culture of dependency on our UK head office had developed while it was receiving a subsidy to break-even. The subsidy had always been planned for in the operation's adolescence but an expectation that it would be there forever had developed. Changing that mentality was hard and was achieved by allowing staff in Zambia to take more ownership and responsibility over the operation.
For other enterprises going through a similar situation I would recommend involving as many of your staff as possible in your planning processes so that everyone buys into the need for the organisation to stand on its own two feet financially. If your enterprise is a charity, I would use the word sparingly, or even ban it. Alive & Kicking is a registered charity in the UK but we try not to refer to ourselves as such, as it creates unhelpful and unrealistic expectations both within and outside the organisation, and those expectations are contrary to our aims as an enterprise.
Where do you see Alive & Kicking in five years?
Within five years I see us providing the lion's share of the sports balls for the African market and being the leader in fair trade footballs for the Western market too. I foresee us doing business from at least four locations in Africa, with each of them operating their own health awareness and ball donation programmes.
I hope other organisations will recreate our model, with different products, in other parts of the world. I believe this type of social enterprise model can play a pivotal role in international development because it has the ability to attract funding and other subsidies, and to create results, that other businesses or charities aren't able to. For that reason I see social enterprise playing a growing role in providing economic growth to under-developed areas.
Which other social entrepreneur or social enterprise do you admire most and why?
The social enterprise I admire most is actually a cooperative, the Phone Co-Op. I guess I like it so much because from a political point of view I believe in the co-operative model as a positive structure to provide the goods and services society needs. What's special about the Phone Co-Op is that it proves that even technically complicated utilities can be provided just as well, if not better, by a cooperative.
What are the biggest challenges you have faced as director of Alive & Kicking and how did you overcome these?
The biggest challenges I've faced have touched on the tension between fulfilling our social objectives and our need to operate sustainably. The most prominent instance of this tension was when we took the decision to close down our factory in South Africa because we couldn't envisage it becoming sustainable. This was an incredibly difficult decision to take as the livelihoods of 30 women who stitched balls for us, and depended on us, as did countless schools whose sports programmes were dependent on receiving the balls we made.
The business case for operating in South Africa had deteriorated with changes to labour laws and the influx of cheap imported balls before the World Cup, but our decision to stay or go could not depend entirely on a business case, otherwise we could hardly claim to be a social enterprise. In the end we realised that our South African operation would likely have to be subsidised indefinitely in order to break-even and we had to weigh up the difference that that amount of subsidy could make in South Africa as opposed to elsewhere in the future, as well as the risk such a model would pose to our other operations. In the end we decided to focus our resources elsewhere and incorporated the South African centre's capacity into our Zambian factory.
I am lucky to have the help of a supportive board who understand the organisation and the tensions within it intimately, they were instrumental in coming to the right decision on our South African operation.
What's the best business decision you have made in the past 12 months?
The best business decision I've made in the past 12 months has been to re-examine what has made us successful and what has hindered our progress. I think it's dangerous to believe you know what's best for your business simply because you work on it every day, and it's important to rigorously test your own assumptions.
If you could introduce a measure of support (funding, policy, etc) to support social enterprises, what would it be?
I would introduce a favourable tax system for products produced by social enterprises, for example a reduced VAT rate, so that social enterprises had a competitive advantage in the market.
What would you be doing if you weren't running Alive & Kicking?
If I wasn't running Alive & Kicking then I'd probably still be involved in international development. However I'd be unfulfilled, as I've not come across a better international development organisation than this.
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