A few weeks ago, I decided to start again but this time, try to document my process consistently. I technically started again yesterday. It was supposed to be my mother's 65th birthday, she was supposed to retire, and I was supposed to start thriving because she called me her 'pension', but unfortunately she passed away 9 months ago. I hope she is in a better place.

I am a very private person, so I am not going to be putting this experiment on social media as yet, but I am going to document the journey as well as my thoughts and theories on development. I want to see just how much I can grow this organically, to see if it actually works when done the right way.  I am starting two complimentary creative cultural businesses with the least amount of money that makes sense in a Southern African economy. It probably won't make sense to a lot of you, but I am starting from bootstraps and over a decade of experience, so I have my reasons why I will do some seemingly senseless things for the plot and not bother with other supposedly useful stuff, depending on the country I am in at that point. 

Since I deleted all my other posts, I guess I need to introduce myself. Hi, my name is Nyasha Clesby Nhutsve, I am a Sociology graduate with an unhealthy fascination with African Industrial Sociology. I am also a creative, in so many respects, which is where I make my money. I believe in sustainable community led development as the solution to Africa's challenges and while we all know how technological development can spur economic growth, I like to focus on sustainable industrial development instead. When I started this 12 years ago, I wanted to figure out how a producer can ethically start from craftsmanship and end up knee-deep in Fordism, standardisation and mass production. I did it, and failed, did it again and failed, rinse and repeat, multiple times. Eventually I figured out what works for my country, Zimbabwe, and since it is ridiculously hard to start and run a business here, even in the best of times, I think I can use my experience to show that it can be done within this region of the world that I live in. 

I believe that Cultural and creative industries are the basis of every innovation and enterprise. Let me explain, if you live in a former British colony, it is commonplace to find people having breakfast that includes bread and tea for working class people because of colonial culture, therefore bakeries are a lucrative enterprise because of the inherited colonial culture. That is a very general example, let's look at something more specific, if you were to develop a new way to weave plaid fabric, you might not have a good market for it in Zimbabwe, but if you were to go to the Southern province of Zambia or the Masai-mara in Kenya and Tanzania, whose Lozi and Masai tribal attires were heavily influenced by Scottish colonialists, you would have a thriving market. In Southern Africa we grow small grains, and we have an abundance of certain wild fruits and berries. If someone was to create a tabletop domestic grinding machine for grinding sorghum into meal powder and use David Gwata's Gwatamatic to cook it into pap, that is innovation that has come from our culture of eating pap. 

I could go on and on, but the point of this challenge is to start both creative cultural businesses with USD $200 each and see if I can get them to earn 5 figures within a year. I will be paying myself this time around, an hourly wage and updating weekly, I might sprinkle in more updates when I have the strength to, but I have an autoimmune condition so most times I just do not have the spoons to do too much. ( look up spoon theory)

The first business will be a fashion accessory and design business. So I purchased a second hand Singer hand crank for $50, I got a little motor for it $15, then I decked it out with new bobbins, needles and bobbin cases for $5, and I will be paying for the thread as I go. I got some pattern paper for $3. My rulers, pencils, tape measure, pins and tracing wheel cost a total of $15. This brings our total to $88 so far. Let us round that up to $90 and factor in that thread, we were talking about. The goal is to start selling as soon as possible. So online it will be as soon as I am done, but at market spaces I want to at least have 50 items, different products. I will figure it out as I go. I think this is enough executive thinking for today, I am out of spoons . We can talk about business number 2 tomorrow.