Welcome to A Personal Touch. I’m Rebecca Cressman and this gives us a chance to meet ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Our guest today on A Personal Touch is Louis Pope who happens to not only be the head of the Pope Foundation but the President and CEO of U.S. Synthetics. And I have to say Mr. Pope, that it is such a pleasure to have you with us today; thank you so much.
Well I appreciate you inviting me.
Q: Now tell me a bit about how a man who has led a company like U.S. Synthetics finds himself working in the rural communities of Kenya. Tell me about that?
A: Well I think there is some point in my entrepreneurially career where I thought we actually might make it. Have some money and some responsibility to do something good with that money. And so I think we started looking out early on to say, “Where could we wisely use our resources?” It ends up that we fell in love with Kenya and found some good applications of funds and we have been there since about ‘99.
Q: All right, so that is about ten years. And with that when you say wanting to make a difference or wanting to be able to do something good with the resources you have, Kenya is just one of the many nations in Africa that does have a tremendous amount of challenges ahead of it economically. And there have been steps taken to try to help the women in particular get access to loans so that they can become providers for their families. Have you built a model very similarly then? I know you have a business called Coast Coconut Farms, tell me about how that fits into that picture?
A: All right, what we began with was micro credit; micro finance. And we tried to replicate ourselves after what Mohammed Unis had done in Bangladesh twenty years earlier. And it is basically what you just mentioned: the idea of loaning women that are very poor small amounts of money to enrich their businesses. Help them grow their personal income by employing themselves in whatever enterprise that they want to be engaged in. So we thought that would be a good tool as it has been proven and it is working. There are billions of dollars out there in the world right now. Far less than needs to be, but anyway, that is what we chose to do. And so we did that for eight or nine years and we are satisfied with the results. But we thought the next rung on the ladder is probably helping those ladies find businesses that are a little more productive where they don’t have to do the same thing: sell tomatoes like their neighbors, because that is all they have seen done. But try to give them a business that maybe will give them three or four or five times the income. And we just decided upon coconut oil as that is one of the resources on the coast of Kenya in the rural areas. There are a lot of Coconut trees. As a matter of fact, probably any place in the world you will find a poor man and woman under a Coconut tree. So if we could use some of the products of the Coconut and sell it in world markets, we thought that we could improve their daily income.
Q: And I have heard of a term before, maybe you shared it with me on a previous occasion, “The difference between micro financing and micro enterprise.” And I am curious about that. So micro financing which you have done very successfully for a number of years, you have thousands of women in Kenya who are benefitting from those micro loans. Getting money, right? And then going out and establishing their businesses. Now you are looking at saying, “Okay what else can we do beyond that where they can be earning more money in a slightly different industry?” So what are they doing with the coconut trees? Are they actually collecting and manufacturing the coconut oil, and then distributing it themselves?
A: Well I guess it starts with a farmer who is now able to get a cash crop for his coconuts. So that is one little franchise. It is a small franchise; it may be two hundred dollars a year if he has one acre of coconut trees. But being able to convert his coconuts to cash that is one franchise. The other one is three or four ladies will group together and they will take the coconuts and dry the meat and press the oil out of it and we will purchase the oil from them. So every Friday, we will make a run past their mud hut, pick up five gallons of oil that they have produced that week, and that little group of ladies will be making about twenty-five dollars a day. That will be another franchise; the oil making franchise. Her cost of equipment may be two hundred dollars and she will borrow that money from the bank, the micro credit bank, and then she will have an enterprise that she can employ her neighbors and have a guaranteed income. Most of these ladies spend half their time trying to sell their goods, so if we can guarantee that we will buy it… Then we may go from oil to eggs to chickens to whatever we think we can trade in the world market or in the Kenya market, and take the burden of selling off of them and help them on the routine procedures of how to do it profitably. Anyway I think that is the concept, just a business in a box that we can teach the ladies simple business enterprises and then help them in it.
Q: How is it going so far? I know that you have an opportunity not only to travel frequently to Kenya but you and your foundation have been there on many, many occasions. What are you seeing as this is beginning to grow in terms of the changes in the lives of these women?
A: Oh it makes a huge difference. The ladies are very responsible with their income when they get it. When they get a little increase they will get their children in school, they will have better nutrition in the family. They will have a little reserve in case they need to buy the two dollar malaria medicine should one of their kids get malaria, so that you see a dramatic change in lives. They will use the resources wisely if they are able to get a few more. Anyway we are feeling quite satisfied, and this principle of micro credit is working; this principle of micro franchise is also working in lots of different ways all across Africa and different parts of the poor world. So I think that will be another movement, the idea of micro franchise.
Q: Now I mentioned that you were very successful in the beginning when you established the micro credit opportunities for that region of Kenya, and you had over 15, 000 women at that point who had enrolled or participated?
A: We do and we think that will… we have made some recent partnerships with organizations that want to help us grow and I think it is within the realm of possibility that within five, ten years, there will be a quarter of a million ladies. So we do not have a cap on our growth. I think the need, like I said, for penetration of finance and borrowing for these poor rural ladies is a pretty big market. We have probably tapped five percent of it, so there is lots of room for growth and more good to be done.
Q: And I want to touch on that good too, because you’re hands on right now. I mean, you are using your business expertise, your entrepreneur experience to help set up these businesses and franchises for the women in Kenya. What about those of us who are outside of your foundation, outside of your organization? How can we be of support of what you are doing?
A: We have had lots of great help from ladies that are mompreneurs that want to just in their own network of friends try to help. They may be purchasing some of the products that we get from Kenya. They may be purchasing the coconut oil or the lotions or the coconut oil sticks. They may just be starting some action group of their own to do something similar to what we are doing. We have for instance six kids over there right now, I call them kids but they are college graduates, they are volunteers that are working as interns in Kenya, as we speak. They are just donating their time. They raised their own money to get over there and they are living in the rural areas of Kenya helping on our projects. So there is just a plethora of good ways to help if someone really wants to get involved.
Q: I was noticing an article about some of the Brigham Young University students that had traveled there. So are these students that are there from BYU, or are they from other universities now as well?
A: Well they are kids from Duke, some from the University of Utah, some from BYU, some from Harvard. There is a network of kids out there that want to do good. I think we are all wired that way. If we see the opportunity; and being exposed to it now in this global world, I think there are more and more volunteers to get involved in helping some of these world problems.
Q: Now you are also going to have an up close and personal experience in Kenya. You are actually going to be moving there. When do you plan to move and why?
A: Well I am retiring now as CEO of U.S. Synthetic. I will wind up the end of this year. And we are building a home over there. My wife bought into this and we have been, she has been over there with me about eight times, I’ve been over there about twenty. But on that eighth trip she said, “I think I can do this.” And so the plan is to live over there eight months of the year or so, and try to be more intense on watching this business grow and helping anyway we can.
Q: Well and you indicated that you think that we are wired to want to make a difference or wired to do good. I am just curious, Louis, as you have had experience in many different businesses and entrepreneurships, what is the difference between doing something like you are doing now where the residual impact is life changing and not just profit generating? How does that change your whole perspective as a businessman?
A: You know, I think it has been fun to grow the U.S. Synthetic business. We have 600 employees here, and those families grow and develop. But it is on a different scale over there, and like you say, a little bit goes a lot further. So a dollar makes a difference over there and the opportunity to actually get to know the people whose lives we are affecting and watch their lives grow and help them develop their potential is just tremendously satisfying. So I think being President of U.S. Synthetic and having that experience here has been fun, but what we are doing over there is way funner.
Q: All right, well Mr. Pope, thank you so much for what you are doing, for the example you are setting, for the opportunities that you are providing, not only for the families in Kenya but for the interns who are there on the ground right now. Their lives will be changed by their experience working with your enterprise and providing an opportunity for the rest of us to support you. We do have a link to Coast Coconut Farms where we can learn a little bit more about the coconut oil and the individual women who are participating in your micro franchise. And I appreciate you sharing your time with us here on A Personal Touch. Thank you very, very much.
A: Thank you I appreciate the opportunity, bye, bye.
And I’m Rebecca Cressman, and thank you for joining us for this week’s edition of A Personal Touch. Be sure to check your email next week to find out who else like Louis Pope is making a difference in our world with a Personal Touch.
End of interview.
