Upon entering this project, I saw it more as a nutrition issue that could be solved with logical and mathematical methods. However, through research and world of mouth from the prior team who went to Sierra Leone, there are a lot of cultural factors in place especially when it comes to selling a product. Things such as political aspects, environmental roles, and hierarchy all factor greatly into our project. I very quickly realized how much cultural dimension this project has to it. To begin, females, especially mothers and grandmothers, have a major influential role in terms of deciding what they’re children eat on a regular basis. This cultural issue is something that must be surmounted as we are making products for children ages 2-5. Convincing mothers of the importance and usefulness of our product will be integral to success. Second, a cultural influence that we must keep in mind is the daily economy that exists in Sierra Leone. Therefore, we are making lowering cost of our product a priority to account for this. Lastly, to account for taboos associated with foods, such as bananas, we are limiting how much if any of those we include in our muffins so that these products can be easily incorporated into their normal diets. At home, some of these social situations are very similar. To begin, a child’s diet does highly rely on the approval of the parental influence. Although the daily economy is not common in the U.S for grown adults, such a thing exists with children working for a paycheck or college students with very limited budgets. Lastly, negative associations with certain foods definitely exist in the U.S., especially from a child’s point of view. Any item made with or resembling foods like broccoli or brussel sprouts would never win the approval of children.

Despite these cultural considerations, few of them can be leveraged to address community/ market problems. For example, the popularity of street food and the level of accessibility is something that we can take advantage of to achieve success for our product. Removing the need to travel to a market will be a really attractive feature for our product. Additionally making our products very cheap such as 25 cents will address the market problems and allow for greater purchases. Lastly, the nutrition benefits should allow for community backing of the product.

In regard to our ventures, the African context definitely presents different challenges than the American context. The economy is definitely a major factor, being that Africans base their expenses based off the money they made that day. Contrary to this, Americans can afford to buy more expensive products because they are obtaining larger salaries over larger periods of time. Also, new products in the USA are widely accepted, but in Sierra Leone products need to be widely established and approved. Lastly, transportation is a major struggle in Sierra Leone because of poor infrastructure, however, this is not an issue at all in the US. Although there are different challenges, the African context offers the resources of a large labor force which can be used to sell our products, the street food market which is small in the US, and an abundance of readily grown crops such as sweet potatoes that are integral to our muffins.