Q. Please give a brief explanation of the Korean franchise, KAINA.
A. There is a community in the Philippines called the Maogma Village, where vulnerable social class women live together. The Korean franchise, KAINA, hires and operates the restaurant run by women from the Maogma village
Q. There are many different kinds of franchises. Is there a special reason why you picked a Korean franchise?
A. To be honest, we came up with the solution after focusing on the problem. At first, we focused on the 5th Sustainable Development Goal (SDG), which is gender equality. Since we kept gender equality in our minds, the place we went for fieldwork was the Maogma village in the Philippines, where the women of the vulnerable social class live together. When we first went to the village, we did not particularly have a Korean franchise in mind. However, we started to think about what would work out well for these women, who turned out to be excellent cooks. Also, since we were from Korea, we came to the conclusion of handing them a Korean recipe and therefore going on with a Korean franchise had enough possibility.
Q. In detail, can you explain how KAINA helps the women of the Philippines?
A. There are three steps involved in this. First is to train. There are two friends in the team who are good cooks. However, that is by no means saying that they are professionals. So recently, we focused a lot on learning from a franchise specialist, or anyone with experience in doing business in the Philippines or those who are good cooks. Currently, we are making a manual out of it, in order to overcome the language barrier. Because as hard as it is to teach even in Korean, it is even harder in a different language. In addition to cooking lessons, we find it essential to teach these women where to get the ingredients and to learn how it works to operate a restaurant in general. We assume that the first step would take about a month. The second step involves giving jobs and working together with these women for about a year. Our final step is giving these ladies the operation rights to run these restaurants themselves.
Q. What are your final goals for KAINA?
A. Money is not the concern at all. Our hope is that by doing this, it will help in bringing a fresh sense to the people in the Philippines. The problems are being looked upon as something that’s obvious
in their countries. But since the students are coming from Korea to solve these problems, we think this would work asmotivation for the women to change their situation. Our first goal is to have the local companies’ and people̓s perceptions change. The second goal is more realistic and it is for the franchise restaurants to get well-adjusted and spread out.