AEP Launches Entrepreneurship & Financial Literacy Program with Parent Training
By Annabel Mumba
Annabel Mumba is AEP’s Donor Relations Coordinator in Zambia. She is a Scholarship Fund recipient, high school graduate, and one of our latest Success Stories.
If there are any immediate takeaways from the COVID-19 pandemic, we can certainly say that it opened our eyes to the financial reality faced by our families in Kafue. When our community went into lockdown due to the rising number of cases, we learned that our families could not afford to stay home. Many of our families depend on their daily wages selling “piece meal” or the few vegetables they have grown, at the local market to feed their children each day.
The African Education Program (AEP) identified this urgent need early on in the pandemic. And since our model has evolved over the years into a number of programs that provide holistic support that meet our students and their families where the need is greatest, we realized that this was an opportunity to come alongside our families and our community to support them. If we increase the ripple effect of empowering our girls and boys to bring an end to poverty by educating and empowering their families too, it is a win/win for the community.
This past February, AEP had the opportunity to send two of its graduates to Uganda to be trained by Street Business School (SBS). SBS has spent over a decade honing their customized business training across the country empowering women through entrepreneurial training. Their proven Train-the-Trainer model has reached over 52,000 people and their one-on-one coaching, mentoring and follow-up helps every woman (and man) build confidence, amplify their dignity and believe in themselves.
Benard Milanzi, an AEP university graduate from the University of Zambia who studied Economics and Business Administration and Violet Mukumbwa, an AEP high school graduate, became Certified Lead Coaches and arrived back in Kafue with lots of ideas on how to implement the SBS training in our community. When they decided to hold an informal session to share our Entrepreneurship Program concept with the parents and guardians of our girls and boys, over 100 showed up and 93% of the attendees were women. We were right, the need is great.
Benard and Violet decided to create a cohort of 30 parents in each session and embarked on their first training in May. The training, held at AEP’s learning and leadership center, consists of nine modules and runs for four months. The parents will be taught how to manage and run a business successfully and money management including how to save and how to source capital.
Our Entrepreneurial coaches learned that some of the businesses run by our parents include selling charcoal and cooking oil on small grocery stands outside of their homes and vegetables and tomatoes at the local markets. They also learned that ALL of the parents have never received any formal training for business management. Most of them started their business solely on word of mouth and through observation from their neighbors who ran a similar business and managed to make a living out of it.
“Working in the community is a great privilege. It makes my heart happy to be able to create a positive change in people’s lives that will help improve their business and alleviate poverty.”
Evarasha, one of the parents in the training and mother to Freza, a Grade 11 student in our scholarship program, describes the training as enlightening in that it is showing her the way a business should be managed. She has tried many different businesses in the past including selling vegetables at the market and a grocery stand in front of her house selling sugar packs, salt and charcoal, but without proper business management and learning how to encounter profit and loss, she could hardly keep the business running and often found herself in debt. Evarasha has been in the training for two weeks and the experience and knowledge she has since received is encouraging her to begin her small business once again. She shared, “This training means so much to me and my family. I will be able to run my business successfully and help my family financially. It will really improve our livelihood.”
Evarasha displays an assortment of vegetables that she sells at the local market.
Christabel, on the other hand, is quite experienced and has been running her business selling tomatoes and vegetables for 10 years. It has been her way of life and has sustained her throughout. She is excited about the opportunity to learn how to manage her entire business. She explained how in the past years it was hard for her to track the success of her business. She never knew much about business management, how to manage her profits or how to bounce back from losses.
Christabel is known for her tomato and vegetable stand at the local market.
Ten of our parents from the training are currently not in business at the moment but would like to begin one soon after the training ends. The reasons why they are not in business raged from lack of capital to not know how to manage the business itself, one parent called it “fear to fail” as they are scared to fail because they have seen their counterparts fail at times.
Brandina lives in the Kalundu View community, it is one of the poorest in Kafue and a majority of the people sell along the roadside to sustain their livelihoods. Brandina’s husband is a seasonal worker at the Kafue steel mill, one of the leading industries in the town. She has wanted a business of her own for a long time but did not know how she was going to start it and manage it entirely. She says the training is a wakeup call for her to begin working on the business. Before the training she had never heard of ways that she can raise capital. “From a long time I have had a dream to begin a business of my own. I have learned from Coach Benard and Violet business opportunity identification, my skills, competitors, profits and my interests.” Brandina plans on starting a business ordering and selling dried foods such as kapenta, fish and beans once she raises the capital needed.
AEP’s Entrepreneurship Workshop will impact knowledge and empower these women to grow financially and successfully especially for a developing community like Kafue where 40% of its inhabitants are smallholder farmers and half of the population are small traders in which about 60% of these traders are women. There is so much growth and potential in the entrepreneurship industry to thrive in this community. From the recent statistics that we have of our families from the Monitoring and Evaluation department, 48% of homes are female head of households that include mothers, aunties, grandmothers and sisters. So we are passionate to see where this training leads them.
What’s up next for the Entrepreneurial Team? Our coaches will be adapting the training for all levels of students so that even our Young Learners will comprehend financial literacy and every student will one day have the skills and knowledge to start their own business. Stay tuned as we roll out the student program later this year!
“Coming back to work with AEP students who are attending the business training program would mean a lot to me because I believe am helping change their view towards business and entrepreneurship. The training will sharpen their skills, increase their knowledge and open up their minds to pursuing it as a potential career option”