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Also see: Starting a business

Map: South Africa

Notre Dame's College of Business Administration

Gigot Center for Entrepreneurial Studies

Center for Ethics and Religious Values in Business

Center for Social Concerns

Ann McMillin =99MBA and sophomore Patience McHenry =01 were after $50.

The money wasn=t for them, it was for their clients C four women in the rural South African village of Khayelitsha, near Capetown. The women needed 600 Rand (about $50) to begin manufacturing candles for sale in villages, like their own, that lack electricity. The Notre Dame students eventually helped the women acquire a micro-loan from a relief agency=s foundation.

McHenry and McMillin were among six Notre Dame students C all business graduate students or new MBAs except McHenry C who traveled from South Bend to South Africa this past summer to offer advice to infant businesses in the country=s poor townships.

McHenry, a sociology major, was there on a summer service project for Notre Dame=s Center for Social Concerns and was primarily interested in doing a sociological study on the lives of women in the townships. The others made the trip under the auspices of the Notre Dame=s Gigot Center for Entrepreneurial Studies and Center for Ethics and Religious Values in Business.

The business centers= summer program, launched this year, connects Notre Dame with aid groups active in South Africa, including Catholic Charities, Open Society and the Amy Biehl Foundation. The last was named for and founded by the parents and friends of an American student and Fulbright scholar who was beaten and stabbed to death in 1993 when she was helping with voter registration for the nation=s first all-race election.

One of the enterprises the Notre Dame students assisted this past summer was located in Gugulethu, the township near Capetown where Amy Biehl was killed. Mabato=s Take Away, a shop operated out of the owner=s garage, sells eggs, fish, chicken livers and pig heads, among other food and drink. The owner was finding it difficult keeping her shop stocked during months when tuition came due on the boarding schools to which she sent her children to escape the danger and poverty of the township. During the hottest part of the year C January to March in South Africa C when she should be selling lots of drinks, she had none because of a lack of capital to purchase supplies. The solution, again, seemed to lie in a line of credit or micro-loan to help the owner over her cash-flow hump.

James H. Davis, director of the Gigot Center, emphasizes that the teaching aspect of the program works both ways.

AWe are partnering with [the South African business people]. We are not saviors riding in on a white horse,@ he says. While helping them with their problems, he says, the students are also learning about issues important to developing economies like micro-lending.

Davis says past efforts to spur economic development in poor parts of the world have often suffered because foreign aid money was lost to bureaucracy or corruption before it reached the business people who needed it. AWe get out at the grass roots and grow.@

Student participation in the South Africa project was made possible by alumni donations, and an airline donated tickets. While in South Africa, the students lived at the University of Capetown=s Breakwater campus.

Davis says the new program has attracted the interest of other universities who would like to collaborate on entrepreneurial outreach to inner cities in the United States. The Gigot Center has definite plans to launch a similar program in Santiago, Chile, next year, he says, and Jamaica and Honduras are among the other foreign governments that have invited Notre Dame to extend the program to their countries.

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