Curriculum
Learning Outcomes
What our programmes teach, and what someone can do at the end of one that they could not do at the start. Both curricula are published in full for anyone to take and run.
How it is taught
On their own numbers, not a case study
Nobody lectures. Every exercise is worked on the participant’s own trade, with their own figures, in their own language. A cobbler prices cobbling. A vegetable seller maps the customers who walk past the stall each morning.
Cohorts are capped at twenty-five so that nobody sits at the back. Many participants have had little formal schooling, so the material is built to be worked through by talking, drawing and doing rather than by reading.
The teaching is the short part. Both programmes are followed by three months of coaching, which is where most of the change actually happens.
mini-MBA
For micro-entrepreneurs
Programme duration
Four consecutive days, two hours each day, in cohorts of no more than twenty-five. Three months of coaching follow, plus monthly group workshops that cut across cohorts.
By the end, a participant can
Describe their business as a system rather than a daily scramble, price a product knowing the margin, name their customers and what those customers actually need, plan a month rather than a day, and test a change before committing money to it.
Topics covered
- Understanding your business
- Understanding your ecosystem
- Outcome driven planning for your business
- Understanding your customers
- Identifying customer needs
- Customer relationship management
- Basic marketing as applicable to street based trades
- Basic finance as applicable to sole traders
- Health and hygiene
- Innovation, ideas for growth
- Experimentation and prototyping
- Developing a custom business growth plan
The full curriculum is the Business Growth Manual, seventy-seven pages, free to download and adapt. It has been taught in Urdu, Arabic and English.
Numu
For young community leaders
Programme duration
A two-day bootcamp, then twelve weeks of coaching while participants run a real change project where they live. The universities edition closes with a showcase.
By the end, a participant can
Map the system they are standing in and find where it is stuck, tell a simple problem from a complicated one and choose an approach to match, design a small experiment and read the result honestly, and facilitate the same thinking for other people without us in the room.
Tools taught
- Agile principles, in plain language
- Systems thinking and causal loops
- Stacey’s Matrix, for telling simple problems from complex ones
- The Johari Window
- Empathy mapping
- Plan, Do, Check, Act
- Iterative delivery on a two-week rhythm
- Facilitation, practised rather than described
More about the programme and where it has run on the Numu page.
Evidence
How we know any of it landed
Learning outcomes are easy to assert and hard to prove, so we measure the thing that matters to a micro-entrepreneur: whether the business is better off. Participants report revenue and profit before the programme and through the coaching months afterwards.
Across cohorts that gives an average of 45% revenue growth and 97% profitability growth. The individual growth charts and the figures behind them are published with the reports.
None of this is a qualification. There is no certificate that means anything to an employer, because our participants are not looking for employers. What they leave with is a way of running the thing they already own.
See the impact in detail, or read the reports and manuals.
Open source
Take it and run it
Both curricula are published for anyone to use, translate and adapt without asking us first. If you are thinking of running one where you are, we would rather hear from you than not.