It was the Young Entrepreneurship (YE) bazaar at my daughter’s school, a concept introduced this year. It was a bazaar where the students would as groups sell handmade products, and we parents, relatives, teachers and friends would be the buyers. A simple yet awesome learning tool!
From the start of the year, YE classes were held, where the children learnt to make age-appropriate handmade stuff — tie-and-dye handkerchieves, handmade cards, bookmarks, and so on.
Then, around two months before the actual event, they were asked to form groups of five or six within their own classes. This group as a team would hold shop on the actual day to sell handmade goods. My daughter formed a team of six girls from her class. They met and spoke and argued and cajoled one another to decide what they would make and sell. We parents, as usual, chauffeured and chaperoned!
They had to make a printed business plan which included details of their products with pricing, the participants, the name of the shop and sundry details. Each shop was allotted a room in which they had to set up their shop.
Posters had to be put up a week before the event. The kids had to go around with handmade cards to invite teachers, relatives and friends. What lovely interactions and experiences!
The actual handmade stuff from her group included strawberry cookies with toppings, buttermilk, grape juice, strawberry jelly, cupcakes, plants from a home garden, slime, bookmarks and beaded earrings. All handmade by the kids with purchases and help from doting parents, of course. Apart from this, they had games of chance people could play. Can you imagine 11-year-olds so resourceful!
Then D-day dawned and the excited little ones set up their shops and decorated them. Visitors poured in. For two hours, the school was transformed into a colourful bazaar with the children hawking their wares. There was stuff from old books to handmade cards, sandwiches to soups, fresh organic produce to slime, earrings to lip-balms, tattoos to tacos. They were so enterprising. They walked around advertising their products. They pulled unsuspecting uncles and aunties to sample their wares. They wheedled and blackmailed their friends to buy their stuff. The highlight was a boy slashing his prices by 70% during the last 10 minutes. This one is a future business whiz, for sure.
Now with the bazaar behind them, each group submits a report of their cost, turnover and profit.
My daughter who is 11 years old had experienced the entrepreneurship cycle — from the birth of an idea, forming a team of like-minded people, brainstorming ideas, making prototypes, division of work, marketing tools, working as a team, pricing, making the end-products and finally selling them to a captive audience of parents, relatives, teachers and friends. Wow! I, in all of my 40-plus years, had never learnt stuff like this experientially. So many what-ifs crowd my mind. What if we as kids had been exposed to such stuff? Would there have been more entrepreneurs in our midst than the salaried couch potatoes we are now? Would I personally have carried through on my dreams of mini-entrepreneurship which I have been scared to venture into till now?
I know, it isn’t too late to make a start. But this childhood learning for my daughter will definitely give her an edge over what we had. It is an exciting age to be a student!
pbhema@yahoo.com
