The Gift of Printing

Today we passed through Mpika again and went to go see Gift at the Cama Centre. We trained Gift on printing for a second time and this time with an even more in depth look at how to vary size and quality of printing as well as the type of paper they print on.

It was interesting because the girls wanted to simply charge a set fee for printing and a set fee for copying. But I explained to Gift that their costs were essentially labor, paper and toner (and eventually perhaps electricity and rent). I told her that the larger the image and the higher quality the print job, the more toner they use and the more it costs them to produce. I developed a pricing matrix for Gift based on the following:

• 3 varying levels of quality
• 3 different sizes
• paper type (glossy versus matte)
• black and white versus color
• printing versus copying.

Although it seems confusing at first, I do believe their customers would be scared away by some of their pricing if they did not adjust the pricing based on these elements. I was motivated to do come up with this price matrix when the first 24 black and white matte paper copies that we made on Chanda’s request came to 96,000 Kwacha (K) - that is $20!!

We trained Gift on using the solar panels and small battery. Gift is an extraordinarily bright girl. She is very observant and she does a great job teaching the other girls. It is clear she is bright, has a very strong character and is a natural leader. The Cama girls really look up to her and she seems much more mature than her age. On top of all of this, she is striking in appearance, with beautiful, prominent cheekbones and standing just short of 6 feet tall. I told Melody that if Gift lived in the U.S., she would have already been scouted by someone to do runway modeling. Someone pointed out that she is small breasted. “Cheekbones and legs”, I said, “That’s what they really want.”

Melody and I discussed the possibility of creating a database for the Cama girls. The DB would contain detail such as suppliers, goods and services, cost of raw goods and services by region, etc. I think that the Cama girls would find some great information if they had a way to lookup what other groups had done in terms of purchasing, contacts, sourcing goods and services and other data essential to starting and running the businesses.