City of Hope (Uniform Factory)

We seek to empower unemployed young tradesmen men and women in Sierra Leone, including people with disabilities, who have similar skill sets by supporting them to create small and medium-sized partnership enterprises instead of helping them to seek jobs. Basically, we will empower entrepreneurs to create enterprises.

Our primary product is the establishment of the first Garment Factory in Sierra Leone which will specialise in producing uniforms for public and private sector organisation, including the emergency service and schools. Eventually, this project will reduce the procurement of public sector uniforms from abroad. We will also have a component for apprenticeship and on-the-job-training in this project.

The Garment Factory will serve as an income generation and match-funding base for City of Hope fundraising efforts. Between 50 – 100 young men and women tailors will be employed in the first year. They will have the first opportunity of a franchise.

City of Hope is a newly established organisation which came into existence as a result of a series in of formal and informal meetings and discussions held in Freetown in February 2020 with civil servants, members of the business community, business institutions, government officials and a host of young people. We were looking into the possibility of answering the question; "what can we do to strengthen the middle-level income earners in Sierra Leone?

According to the Government of Sierra Leone, Youth Development report (2012) Sierra Leone has 1.7 million young people – 75 per cent of its population is below the age of 35, and this number will only grow. 60 per cent of young people are structurally unemployed – they are unable to provide sufficiently for themselves and their families.

The World Bank reports that there were approximately 3 million young people between the ages of 10-35 years in Sierra Leone in 2019, and this number is set to increase to 3.7 million by 2050.

With the current economic growth projection of the country, this projected increase in the youth population represents an opportunity to enhance the youth potential to Sierra Leone achieving a Middle-Income Status by 2030.

We plan to build and equip a garment-making factory that will engage trained, men and women tailors and apprentices to produce uniforms for public sector organisation such as the police, armed forces and all other emergency services and schools.

Production will start in the outskirts of the capital city, Freetown but will extended to various District Headquarter Towns

The factory will comprise of the following components:

• Fabric sourcing
• Accessory store team
• Purchasing team
• Task planning team
• Garment manufacturing
• Cutting and Sewing
• Repairing
• Finishing and assembling
• Security

There will the main factory hall for making finished products, design and cutting rooms, storage facilities canteen, shower rooms and toilets and a security room

The factory will be built with bricks, which helps to adjust the building's temperature. The buildings will be powered by a solar plant and water supply from rainwater harvested from 6 months of rain in the rainy season and treated wells with pumps. We will use fabric cutting machines in order to increase efficiency and raise the productivity

A chain of shops around the country will form factory outlets for uniform and school gear such as bags, belt, hats for both primary and Secondary schools 

Our programme will serve:

Unemployed trades men and women

• Hundreds of young people between the ages of 15 and 35 years graduate each year from trade schools. They have no jobs after training. The government cannot employ them. The private sector underpays them even though they are skilled workers.
• These form the shattered middle level manpower sector. We hope to lift them up from this state of poverty and misery through support for job creation and partnership working
• Our organised apprenticeship programme will help unskilled workers gain skill, be productive and enabled to lift themselves out poverty

 Disadvantage children

• Under our Corporate Social Responsibility programme, 100 children from poor communities in the countryside will benefit from our gift of school uniform and school gear annually.

The public sector gains

• Government departments can reduce their budgets because we can offer our products at competitive prices. Our work will reduce delays and produce confident looking officers all over the country
• Thousands of nurses, doctors and care workers who are responsible for procuring their individual uniforms will have the respite of purchasing from our chain of outlets.
• officers who receive only one set of uniforms annually can buy uniforms at reasonable prices.

Both organisations seek to address the same theme; i.e. to reduce the burden of poverty amongst the most vulnerable in society. In our case the underprivileged jobless graduates from polytechnics and trade schools including people with disabilities.

Both organisations seek to empower the marginalised to create jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities for themselves.

Our target group have no starting capital, they work as labourers but can only earn $1 a day. CoH will empower budding entrepreneurs and create enterprises

We will bring skilled and unskilled trades men and women together, with similar trade skills set, to work in small partnership cells. 

Our Mode of operations is different                           Our flagship project is the Hope Academy for 

Business and Entrepreneurship.

But in order to get there, we are setting up a uniform-making enterprise which will serve as an income generation stream for funding the Hope Academy. By this we do not have to rely solely on investors, financiers and grant makers.

Our product is different

The Hope Uniform Factory will be the only business specialised in producing uniforms in Sierra Leone; in a country where all public service officials, including the emergency services and schools buy their own individual uniforms we hope to provide the products at affordable cost for our customers.  We will make uniforms for private sector workers and donate sets of uniforms to underprivileged children annually, for children in deprived communities under our CSR policy.

Our support to beneficiaries is also different

We do not support individuals, however, we support Individuals with similar skills set to work as partners in a group and plying their trade successfully. We will provide match funding for each group to start their business and support them in Registering their business and  reference in opening their own bank accounts . This gives them advantage to sources of loans and grants for SMEs

Our location is Unique

We are the only enterprise that is not scrambling to locate an industry in the city centre. City of Hope will be built in the Freetown

Our buildings will be built using bricks. Brick is energy efficient. It is low maintenance and weatherproof. Brick is secure, it is an investment for life. It is sustainable. Brick is the building material of choice.

Our water supply would come from treated water-wells with pumps and by harvesting rainwater. Sierra Leone has almost 6 months of rainfall in a year. Rainwater that falls on our roofs is essentially free.  The cost of supplying mains water to our community continues to increase.  All it takes is a method of harvest it into tanks for later use. Rainwater harvesting will help to reduce peak demands during dry season. Rainwater harvesting can be a great educational tool to get people to recognise their individual or household water usage

Sierra Leone gets over 2,500 hours of sunshine a year, therefore, we want our buildings to be powered by solar energy. We believe that the sun is a very powerful energy source that we can utilise to our advantage by installing solar panels. It should make significant difference to our project. Solar energy will reduce electricity bills with low maintenance costs. We can solar energy generate electricity

Sewing machines will play a huge role in meeting the sewing demands in our enterprise of uniform production. Therefore, having a combination of mechanical and computerised sewing machines have lots of features to help us save time and make sewing experience easier and enjoyable.

Our proposed use of technology is either being launched in Sierra Leone or piloted. People are not averse to using them, it’s just that Government has only recently given credence to some of these new technology in the country     

Solar energy, for example, is just beginning to gaining recognition in Sierra Leone. According to the “Renewable Energy Statistics 2017” report by IRENA, there is no solar power capacity installed in Sierra Leone.

The Sierra Leone Energy Revolution, an initiative supported by the President of Sierra Leone, has set bold targets to reach 250,000 homes with distributed solar solutions by the end of 2017, and bring modern energy to all by 2025. To meet these targets, “Power for All” is working with the government, private sector and civil society to support energy policy and planning to raise awareness of the benefits of distributed renewable energy.

Building with mud brick and straws is an old age practice in Sierra Leone. However, our use of bricks in the construction of our buildings may attract investment in “brick making”.

Rainwater harvesting is also an old age practice in Sierra Leone. It’s practiced at small scale in every household during the rainy season. Traditionally, this involves harvesting the rain from a roof. The rain will collect in gutters alongside the roof that channel the water into some sort of tank or barrel. The reality is that rainwater harvesting is becoming a viable alternative for supplying our households and businesses with water.

With the recent Global Entrepreneurship Index showing Sierra Leone to be almost at the bottom of the table, there is need now to start paying serious attention to this problem.

The Small and medium size business sector could play an important role in creating the millions of job opportunities Sierra Leone needs. Entrepreneurship development in Sierra Leone can create large-scale employment opportunities, and promote balanced regional economic development and resurrect the middle level manpower sector again in Sierra Leone.

Reading the Global Entrepreneurship Index (GEI) for 2015, one cannot but observe the fact that Sierra Leone comes a disturbing and worrying 128th out of the 132 countries surveyed.

Apart from the fact that we are close to the bottom of the table, it is also frightening to see that Sierra Leone slipped five places down, from last year’s ranking when we were 123rd.

Sierra Leone stands below the likes of Uganda (123), Benin (124), Burkina Faso (126), Madagascar (127), and Mauritania (129); with Malawi (130), Burundi (131) and Chad (132).

According to the Washington based Global Entrepreneurship and Development Institute who produced the report, Sierra Leone scores 14.6 compared to the best score of 86.2 by the top-ranking country – the United States, followed by Canada, Australia, Denmark and Sweden.

With entrepreneurship widely accepted as the engine of economic growth, employment creation, prosperity and global competitiveness, Sierra Leone must do more to develop this sector, if it is to have any chance of coming out of its current economic predicament

The World Bank’s global ‘Doing Business Report 2016, which measures regulatory, quality and efficiency in doing business, ranks Sierra Leone at 180 among 189 economies.

For a weak economy, such as Sierra Leone, strengthening the institutional foundations for entrepreneurial activity, as well as gradually developing the human capital and physical infrastructure is compulsory, if we are to improve living standards.

What is needed is job-creation not job-seeking. Partnership working not individual efforts, match funding not microfinance of individuals and this is what motivates to us do what we do in City of Hope

Currently,

Between 50 and 60 people young people will benefit directly from the uniform factory including apprentices’ young people between the

In one year, as the uniform factory grows and expands to the provinces, it is envisaged that:

• 100 – 120 between the ages of 15 and 35 will be employed working by the uniform factory
• 500 – 1000 public service workers including the police and military will benefit from out products
• Between 2000 and 5000 school going children will benefit from our products

In five years

• 200 – 500 people will be working for City of Hope nation-wide producing uniforms and allied products
• Between 2,000 and 5,000 public workers would benefit directly from out products
• Between 5000 and 10,000 school going children would benefit from our products

In five years, we hope to have established the Hope Academy for Business and Entrepreneurship

• The first 50 entrepreneurs would have started the first 10 SMEs under the partnership policy.
• These enterprises would be vary in size and in the cash invested in them  
• The enterprises would vary; some tailors, carpenters interior decorators’ pharmacists etc.

Between 2020 and 2030 the following have been planned to address the original question "what can we do to strengthen the middle-level income earners in Sierra Leone?” In other wards what can we do to raise unemployed and marginalised young people out of poverty and give them a sustainable future.

a.Establish a Uniform factory (2020 – 2023)

• This is a pilot project in the first year that will specialise in making uniforms for the public sector including the emergency service and schools
• It will serve as an income generation-based activity to match-fund potential investors, partners and grant makers.

b. Setup the Hope Academy for Business and Entrepreneurship. (2023 – 2025)

• CoH will pilot this venture for one year starting with 2 groups of 50 potential
• Graduates from polytechnics and trade schools will be organised and supported to form partnership enterprises.

c. Create a “Women to Women” development programme (2025)

• Will seek to mobilise and engage women from different rural communities in every district in Sierra Leone, in pursuit of making a living out of producing, marketing and distributing agricultural products. The project will be set up by women, led and managed by women for women.

d. Register City of Hope High School for Business and Entrepreneurship (2027)

• This project will target young people of secondary school age who wish to pursue business and entrepreneurship as a career. Alongside the national curriculum these young people will be encouraged to explore and innovate new business ideas using modern technology.

1. Sierra Leone suffers from many environmental problems including deforestation, degradation and fragmentation, the loss of soil fertility, a dramatic decline and loss of biodiversity, air pollution, and water pollution. These problems hinder Sierra Leone from making progress with regard to economic development
2. Report from UK Trade and Investment and the Foreign & Commonwealth Office looking at potential risks for UK businesses operating in Sierra Leone. This tends to scare investors away. It includes economic and political risks, human rights issues, bribery and corruption, and organised crime.
3. There is an intrinsic risk associated with doing business with the public sector organisations. Protocols, bureaucratic red-tapes and delays may slow down some of the deadlines we have put in place.
4. Corruption is common in Sierra Leone and appears in many forms and at most levels of society. Business deals can be vulnerable to corruption at the highest levels and poorly paid public servants exacerbate the problem. Businesses also face challenges from the tradition of patronage - counterproductive to fair and transparent business dealings. Claims of corruption against the business community and government have been brought by local and international press as well as international businesses.
5. Unreliable electricity supplies, a shortage of funds and a lack of advertising revenue.
6. Punctuality is not necessarily expected especially when its due to being stuck in traffic.
7. Complicated interrelationships between traditional and democratic structures can be difficult to navigate, leading to disputes over land ownership, workers’ rights and community development programmes.

1. Environmental issues:

• We hope to maintain the large trees and greenery that is contained in the one-acre piece of landed property has been acquired for City of Hope project. 

2. The UK reports.

• There is very little we can do about the report because they are not hidden.
• Partners will have to see from our record and output whether City of Hope is worth doing business with.

3. Public sector delays:

• We have surmounted some of these already We use our members in Sierra Leone to purchase the land and undertake the land registration process and company registration without any reference to anyone or anything from abroad. 

4. Corruption on High places

• Bribery is in two ways. The one who is bribed and the person giving the bribe.
• It is for this reason that only 25% of our income will come from public contracts. Most of our wares will be in our outlets for sale 

5. Unreliable power supply.

This is major. Therefore, we are looking to set up solar energy power plant for our supply of electricity. We also will have a standby generator for any eventuality.

6. Punctuality:

This is a problem that can be addressed by teaching people a lesson and setting example. First with staff, then participants and finally the public

7. Land ownership

CoH).CoH is a registered not for profit organisation in the UK (12619825)  as well as in Sierra Leone (SL040620THEC108037).

Our leadership has seven members. Five based in Sierra Leone and two in the UK. Me meet once every month by Skype or Zoom. We do not share profits. We plough our profits back into the programme to further the course of City of Hope. We had to register in Sierra Leone for some of the same reason mentioned above. We know what we want to achieve and we are going about it in diligent fashion.

Seven people work on team. All working pro-bono because we are just starting. 

The Board Chair, the Secretary,  Finance Controller and the Director of Infrastructure sits in the Board

The Operational Team comprises of four members who are the  Senior Management team. They are the Programme Director, The Treasurer personnel manager and the programme manager and the Communications and sales manager.

BERNARD GRAHAM -CEO

Bernard has a background in International Development, with a bias in Poverty, Inequality and Development. He also has over 20 years of Voluntary Sector Manages experience both in the UK and elsewhere and a formidable business coach and fundraiser

RICHARD TURAY

Richard is an experienced PWC-trained Finance Business Partner and qualified accountant. Commercially focused on sound technical and financial knowledge. He is an Association of Accounting Technicians (AAT as well as a Fellow of the Chartered Association of Certified Accountants (FCCA) He has Project managed over £50m in not for profit roles including cash flow management, financial planning and analysis and variance reporting, year-end statutory accounts and audit to donors such as World Bank, EU, DfID, USAID, UN Agencies, AfDB and IDB 

EILEEN GRAHAM - PROGRAMME COORDINATOR 

Eileen is an entrepreneur,  Proprietors and a business coach, She is also a Master Trainer in Early  Childhood and Care Education and a member of the Nursery School Association.

THERESA SASSOH

Theresa is an entrepreneur, a proprietor and business coach. Her discipline is School management. She is an inspector of schools.

SORIE MANSARAY

Mr.  Civil Engineering. Computer literate in MS Word, MS Excel, AutoCAD, and has some ability in few software applicable to civil engineering work.

He has considerable experience in design and construction supervision work involving major highways, erection of buildings, retaining structures, pavement work, drainage structures and bridges.

PETER KAMANDA

At this present moment we are have not yet formed any partnerships. we are taking our time to do so. It is of immense risk to start with a partner who might derail the good work we have done so far or planning to do. Good Ideas die very easily in Sierra Leone and bad ones live for a short while and die later.

KEY RESOURCE

Hope Academy of Business and Entrepreneurship

KEY RESOURCES

We provide 

• Entrepreneurial Skills, Simple estimate skills, loan manage skills and partnership management
• Business coaching 
• support with business registration 
• apprenticeship management skills 
• Negotiation skills
• support with business opening bank account
• business monitoring and auditing 
• interface with successful businesses and entrepreneurs 

TYPE OF INTERVENTION

• We provide match funding to startup businesses
• reference to Government loan scheme for business and entrepreneurship 
• marketing and publicity through our website, social media platforms and through our publications

SEGMENTATION

• links to prominent business men and women through out the country
• links to business people and successful entrepreneurs

VALUE PROPOSITION

• Entrepreneurial Skills 
• Ability to negotiate new business propositions 
• Ability to start up partnership business
• ability to earn own income and start personal savings account
• option to Government grant schemes, scholarships for lager firms
• member of the Hope mentorship scheme

In November 2018 Management decided to put a 10 years plan together to address the problem of poverty, inequality and marginalisation.

We also decided on our prospective sources of funding which are grants, partnerships and match funding. 

We realised that we cannot depend upon grant funding all the time, nor can we go into partnership negotiation empty handed, therefore, we decided to start a "social enterprise" (i.e. the UNIFORM MAKING FACTORY) which we believe is lucrative enough to bring us the most needed revenue to start off other arms of our plans.

Our research tells us that  the police, army and prison officer gets one piece of kit a year and sometimes in two years. The rest of the officers have to buy or make their second or third set. Its the same with nurses and clinical adn medical staff. 

So its possible while we cater for the contract to produce the first set and only set, we can put uniforms in our outlets for sale to these men and women. Of course we will have to seek their permission to put military and police uniforms on the market. 

There is no outlet for affordable uniforms for schools so that is open to us through out the country.

We plan to start small by employing about 50 to 6o trades men and women to work in the factory