We interviewed the founder and general manager of Mopa, Mr. Yijun Huang, in a two-storey building in the Minhang District of Shanghai. He introduced Mopa to us in detail and with eagerness.

The founding of Mopa
Mr. Huang comes from Guangdong Province. Before he founded Mopa in Shanghai in March 2003, he owned an IT company and was once a volunteer in Guangdong in a NPO founded by a person from Taiwan. At the beginning, they went to some under-developed areas in provinces such as Anhui and Hubei to recruit rural women around the age of 30 to 40. These women were given a serious of home service training and Mopa provided them with free accommodation and helped them to find work opportunities in the cities. Now, as Mopa is becoming more and more famous, people are asking for such home service training after hearing about its work. In the four years since it was founded, Mopa has trained more than 800 people and established 4 branches together with a training center in Shanghai and one in Suzhou.

Why Mopa Glitters?
Besides the training of skills and knowledge together with support on legal issues, psychological assistance is central to the work of Mopa. Slogans such as 'Be confident, be liked, be helpful and be hopeful' can be seen almost everywhere on the walls of this building. 'The reason why we have psychological help is that these women are not only poor, but are also not mature enough to service the clients, as some of them are presumptuous, bad-tempered or full of self-contempt. In this industry, both skills and a calm, kind and altruistic attitude are required. Mopa staff help them by means of easy-to-understand Confucianism and Buddhism. Why does Mopa use this ideology? Mr. Huang explained that if they promote the idea of 'customer is god', the listeners might ask us 'what is god?' This would be useless because there is no conception of god in their mind. 'Therefore, we selected ideas which are closer to their cultural background. If we say 'customer is parent', they will catch it at once, and also learn to be thankful to their employers because they give them work opportunities.' Mopa prepared a photo exhibition recently to show photos, taken by professionals, of the beautiful moments when these women are working. This exhibition gives them confidence and lets them feel equality at work and at home.

Management with Internet
In four years, Mopa has developed from a NPO to a social enterprise, because Mr. Huang realized that financial donations are far from enough for the future development of the organization. In the marketing process, he implements his business experience, and several modern and corporate methods. Mopa has a website which is an exchange platform to publish the information of both employees' and clients' needs. Besides that, Mr. Huang set up the first online housekeeping service school which offers free study resources to various training agencies. He said that although many trainees cannot operate computers, the online school at least gives them a concept of what is home service. Also, he opened a home service online network, which can reach more people. Anyone can register on the net and learn all kinds of home service knowledge including English. It even has tests after each class and self assessment.

Future development
In his introduction, Mr. Huang told us some problems they are facing. At first, they thought their work would finish after they trained the women workers and enabled them to be employed. However, later they found all kinds of problems arrising, such as employer/employee conflict. So the next step is to professionalize its home service, to discover what the women are good at: cleaning the windows, mopping the floor, washing clothes, cooking or baby-sitting. With the transformation from one person doing all the home service tasks to professional segmentation of the different jobs and the decrease of the time of home stay, the conflicts will finally be resolved and the customers will be satisfied. At the same time it is necessary to say to the customers that home service workers are not housewives, instead it is a professional and specialized vocation. Therefore, the second floor of the Mopa building has now become a weekend home for the housekeepers, where they can give back private space to the customers and avoid conflicts. The first floor is used for training, and the second for accommodation. When we walked into the living room, a tutor from the Philippines was watching some training materials with the women. In order to develop further, Mr. Huang is planning to cooperate with communities to set up neighbourhood center to get a fixed living place for the housekeepers.

Mopa, now a registered company, has extended another branch of its activities - Mopa Community Development Center - in collaboration with the community center in Pudong New Area, to help laid-off people to find new jobs. And this center will be registered as a social non corporate organization. Mopa is also on the list of social enterprises in the NPO center. Mr. Huang confidently told us that there are 20 million housekeeping service positions in China, and 200,000 in Shanghai alone. He also believes that this number in Shanghai can be increased by hundreds of thousands in the future.

See link above for Shanghai Mopa Housekeeping Service Company website.

Writer: Jeanne Zhu  Translator: ShiJun Zhou