In 2021 alone, CAMFED enabled more than 33,000 young women in countries including Ghana and Malawi to set up their own businesses. Here, we meet some of those women to hear about the highs and lows of business ownership.
If you’ve been following our partnership with CAMFED this month, you’ll know that they prioritise female education - something that is so important to us here at Qissa. What you may not know is CAMFED’s commitment to developing sustainable, women-led businesses. In 2021 alone, CAMFED enabled more than 33,000 young women in countries including Ghana and Malawi to set up their own businesses. To date, 67,330 young female entrepreneurs have started a business with CAMFED’s support, bringing high-quality food, clothing, hygiene products and more to rural communities and beyond.
Dorcas
Dorcas, a CAMFED Association member and entrepreneur from Ghana, is one example of a woman who sees the value of education. While at University (which Dorcas wouldn’t have been able to attend if it wasn’t for the Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program at CAMFED) Dorcas founded her own NGO, supporting basket weaving collectives, girls’ education and women’s empowerment. An awareness of how different things could have been if her mother had been able to complete school strengthened Dorcas’ resolve to help young mothers and victims of early marriage.
Her NGO, ASIGE (Advocacy for Social Inclusion and Girls’ Education), focuses on sexual and reproductive health education designed to tackle high levels of teenage pregnancy and HIV/AIDS, and the provision of income generating skills training such as basket weaving, tailoring and shea butter production for women in the community. By 2022, and after just five years, Dorcas’ cooperatives comprise 429 female artisans, and more than 80 male members engaged in leatherwork.
Dorcas exports the baskets and other household items made from elephant grass to the US, UK, France and Japan. She says:
“What kept me going was that I want to help other people so that they don't suffer... I never give up. I want to get to the highest level so that I can help the deprived people in society.”
Dorcas is certainly giving back. Her NGO has educated over 5,000 children and the sanitary pad centre she set up has distributed over 3,000 sustainable sanitary pads to vulnerable girls to help them stay in school.
Forget
There are so many women who have been helped by CAMFED, which offers everything from training and internships to business loans to help women get set up. Some of the businesses set up with the help of CAMFED Agriculture Guides include climate-smart farms. These guides teach women skills and techniques to improve student nutrition, increase sustainable food production and build community resilience to climate change. 379 Agriculture Guides have supported more than 2,000 women-led businesses with climate smart knowledge.
One such woman, Forget, alongside her colleagues, started a dried foods business in Zimbabwe. Chashi Foods is a socially-minded and environmentally-responsible enterprise that produces natural, dried foods. They dry tomatoes, apples, bananas, paw paw and pineapples, as well as herbs and spices like oregano, thyme and garlic. Forget and her team buy products direct from rural farmers to help improve their profits and their standard of living. At the same time Chashi Foods is contributing to the drawdown of emissions and building resilience in terms of food storage.
Through the CAMFED Association, young women like Forget are helping their communities to build resilience to climate change — passing on knowledge through a cascade system. With other young women who have studied sustainable agriculture, and with experienced farmers in their network, they have contributed to developing CAMFED’s climate-smart Agriculture Guide programme. They listen to and learn from community members, tapping into the Indigenous knowledge they have, and combining that with innovative techniques such as intercropping, drip irrigation, afforestation and soil analysis. CAMFED Association members are aiming to reach 50,000 farmers. It’s crucial to note that the majority of food consumed in Africa is being produced by women, who are often ‘invisible’ as small-holder farmers.
In 2021, Forget joined four other CAMFED Association members at the UN Climate Change Conference, COP26, in Glasgow, bringing the deep expertise, lived experience and grassroots activism of young African women to a global audience, and to the policy-making table.
The list of achievements goes on. CAMFED Association members also run businesses in everything from furniture-making and sunflower oil production to technology repairs. One thing they all have in common is their investment back into the community, empowering and supporting other young women to start their own ventures. As Forget says:
“I wanted to change the narrative not only for myself, but for other girls in my community… I always say we rise by lifting up others.”
