GROWING UP AND GROWING OUT: PATHWAYS FOR WOMEN’S ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT.

GROWING UP AND GROWING OUT: PATHWAYS FOR WOMEN’S ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT.Meet Sulura, a woman who transitioned from selling maize flour to owning her own restaurant. Now she wants to share the secrets of her success with other women entrepreneurs. At TechnoServe, we are lucky to be able to speak to many women with incredible stories. Recently we met Sulura, a woman in Nampula, Mozambique, as part of a study of women entrepreneurs, funded by the ExxonMobil Foundation under the Business Women Connect program. Sulura is a strong, charismatic woman who, upon seeing us talking to women in the market, approached us and demanded that we include her story! We were glad she did, as Sulura’s story is a classic example of women’s economic empowerment in action. Many women in Mozambique experience significant barriers to business growth. The same day we met Sulura, we met a family of three generations of women – Rosa, her daughter, Ana Rafael, and Ana’s newborn daughter – who have been selling maize flour in the same market spot for 20 years. They buy maize from a nearby farm and process it at a local mill. Rosa and Ana Rafael barely make enough money to be able to feed their families. Maize flour is an extremely competitive commodity with low profit margins. When we asked them why they didn’t switch to a different product, Rosa and Ana Rafael said “this is all we know how to do.” Sulura told us that she also began her business journey by selling maize flour in the market. However, instead of sticking to flour, she carefully saved her profits and used these savings to buy fish and shrimp to sell at the market. After a while, she invested in a small stove and started to sell cooked fish, improving her margins and reducing her inventory waste of spoiled fish. Eventually, Sulura had saved enough money to build a small restaurant in the market. Sulura came to realize that whenever her business had “grown up,” it was time to “grow out” into something more profitable. more