By David Sibbald - Founder of the Sumerian Foundation

OK, the title sounds a bit grander than reality, but we've just completed our first UK showing of Johari. We had two events, the first at the Caird Hall in Dundee in front of 1800 business students from all over the UK as part of the Scottish Institute for Enterprise annual summit and the second event was in Edinburgh focussed on demonstrating the value of what we've built with Johari to a small number of potential corporate partners. Both events were a great success (I'll post some pictures later in the week) and perhaps surprisingly the post event discussions were very similar, principally that a model that uses the proceeds from building a successful African company to fund education and care for disadvantaged people is preferable to relying on continual financial donations from the West.

The star of both shows was Charity Ndegwa - who graduated from one of our schools two years ago - who stood up and talked about her experiences and her aspirations for the future, you could have heard a pin drop, pretty impressive stuff for a 17 year old and a great example of what can happen when you create opportunity for someone.

Outcome of both events is that we've substantially increased our base of volunteers who want to help - everyone from trainee lawyers, to fashion photographers, to business students. Part of our plan is to build an eco-system of volunteers from Kenya and from the UK that can donate expertise to help build technical capacity throughout our model from teaching to counselling to retail skills.