Programme
The mini-MBA for micro-entrepreneurs
Eight hours of teaching over four consecutive days that changes how a street trader runs their business, followed by three months of coaching that makes the change stick.
The mini-MBA is a free four-day business programme for micro-entrepreneurs, followed by three months of one-to-one coaching. It is Peace Through Prosperity’s core programme. It brings together design thinking, agile ways of working and the parts of business administration that genuinely apply to a one-person trade. It is delivered inside the community, in the participant’s own language, and it is free to the people who take part.
We have run it with more than 4,000 micro-entrepreneurs across Pakistan, Yemen and Egypt since 2012.
Who it is for
The mini-MBA is for micro-entrepreneurs, not students
Street cobblers, barbers, food vendors, tailors and home-based producers. People running a trade from a pavement or a single room, usually with no formal training, no records, and no margin for a bad month.
There is no qualification to meet and no fee to pay. Cohorts are capped at 25 so that everyone gets time in the room, and where a community asks for it we run female-only cohorts.
Younger people who are not yet running a trade are better served by Numu, our programme for community leaders.
How it runs
Four days, then three months
The four days
Two hours a day, four consecutive days, in a venue inside the community. Pragmatic, interactive exercises rather than lectures. Participants work on their own business throughout, never on a case study.
Three months of coaching
Every participant is offered up to three months of one-to-one coaching afterwards, face to face where we can and remotely where we cannot. This is where most of the measurable change happens.
Monthly workshops
Participants from different cohorts meet monthly. These sessions have proved good at crowd-sourcing help, and at building bridges between communities that would not otherwise meet.
Why the programme is built this way is set out under our approach. Every cohort we have run, by place and date, is listed under past programmes.
Content
What we cover
Twelve topics across the four days, each one worked through on the participant’s own trade.
- Understanding your business
- Understanding your ecosystem
- Outcome-driven planning
- Understanding your customers
- Identifying customer needs
- Customer relationship management
- Basic marketing for street-based trades
- Basic finance for sole traders
- Health and hygiene
- Innovation and ideas for growth
- Experimentation and prototyping
- Building your own growth plan
What changes
What participants report
Measured across participants who completed the programme and the coaching that follows it.
Better margins, not just more turnover — the difference between surviving a bad month and not.
Across 32 marginalised communities in Pakistan, Yemen and Egypt since 2012, in cohorts of no more than twenty-five.
The reports and papers behind these figures are on the impact page.
Where to next
Run it, or fund it
The mini-MBA materials are free to download and run in your own community under Steal Our Stuff, with training and support in your language.
The programme is free to the people who take part because someone else pays for it. There are no grants behind this work.