Okô Project
Market Study for chia, sesame, sunflower and moringa seeds export.
"The project made us realize that we can act out of the box and do a big social project at an affordable price and help people. Acting out of the box also means out of Brazil, not only focusing on national market, because our market is the world."
Maíra Oliveira, one of the consultants in Okô Project
The NGO
InSpark is a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) that aims to use entrepreneurship to generate social impact by helping poorer communities to create their own businesses.
The organization was present in places like Uganda, India and Kenya. In this project, InSpark aimed to export chia, sesame, sunflower and moringa from a community in Nyanja, located in northern Uganda.
The Project
The Okô Project consisted of a Market Study to analyze the best consumer destinations for each product exported by the NGO.
Thus, a macro and microeconomic analysis of the countries was carried out in a process of selection and elimination of options for export.
The project report was done entirely in English.
Stages
Pre-Project
In this first stage, an alignment meeting was held with the allocated team so they could collect some essential information to start the execution of the project. A general research was also carried out into the international market, as well as a research of all Mercosur Commom Nomenclature codes (NCM) that would be analyzed during the project, since there were four products in total.
Market Study
The Market Study consisted of two parts: a macroeconomic analysis and a microeconomic one. The first part aimed at identifying broader factors of possible destinations, such as economic indicators - GDP, growth rate, inflation - and political aspects - level of political stability. Based on a careful analysis of these data, two countries per product were selected for the next phase. Then, the microeconomic research deepened the analysis of the products through variables such as: tariff and non-tariff barriers both from Uganda and from the countries previously selected, cultural resources related to the receptivity of the product in each country and competitive aspects in the local and international market. .
Conclusion
The last stage of the project was dedicated to the compilation and layout of the final report, which provided all the information in a complete and summarized way. In addition, the Conclusion Report presented which were the most promising destinations for exports according to the data analyzed during the Market Study.
Results
It was an extremely important project, both for the NGO and Domani Consultoria, since it had the main objective of helping the Nyanja community. It was the first social project made by Domani, which represented a greater practical alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and a maturation of our Junior Enterprise (JE) with international issues and with social entrepreneurship.
The greatest learning that Domani carried through the execution of the project was to use our tools and our privileged knowledge of a JE from the University of Brasilia to promote significant changes in society that are aligned with sustainable economic development. Another advance was to work for the first time with markets that did not involve the Brazilian, in order to add knowledge and training to consultants.