Young Women in Enterprise

The project I am working on – Young Women in Enterprise (YWE) – is amazing to say the least. After two years of piloting, TechnoServe is now wrapping up its first year of the program. The girls recruited for YWE are either high school girls or girls from the community. Girls are recruited from two large slums in Nairobi – Mathare and Kawangware. The life cycle of the program is six months of intense training in entrepreneurship, employability, financial literacy, and life skills followed by practical business experience, a business plan competition, and aftercare once businesses are set up and running. I will be helping with the aftercare component and also with marketing efforts, monitoring and evaluation, and redesign.

I was lucky enough to go on my first field visit last week to visit two of the businesses that have been established by girls from the YWE program. The experience was very inspiring. I first visited two girls, Tabitha and Helen, who have set up a group business called the Norway Café. Why Norway? Because they liked the sound of it. Fair enough.

The café is a small shack that was put up by Tabitha’s cousin within the compound of the car garage he manages. The menu includes ugali (sort of like idli), chai, chapati, sardines, beef, and intestines. I stuck to just having some chai as the other options all involved some sort of red meat (I’m not sure if intestines counts as red meat but I’m going to err on the side of caution). It was great to see two girls, both of whom live in the slums and have dropped out of school, doing something to give them financial independence. I think that Helen said it best when she said “I can see poverty leaving us.” They are great entrepreneurs and keep records of everything. Looking at their balance sheet brought me back to the days of Accounting 101. I hope their business does better than I did in that class.

I love the fact that I get to participate during the phase of the project where you can see all the hard work these girls have done materialize into something live changing. The girls have developed more than just business skills. They have gained confidence and a chance at a better life in the future than what they have had to experience thus far. I read a statistic that when girls and women earn income, they reinvest 90% of it into their families, as compared to 30-40% for men. You can take this statistic with a grain of salt but I think the idea is that investing in girls is just a more sound business investment. No offense, boys.

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