Uganda Entry 8 — The Challenges of Economically Empowering Women

I have been in Uganda for nearly 2 months and have written many pieces about my time here, but none thus far reflect my actual work here. This is not from lack of trying. I’ve started and left unfinished many pieces. The problem is poverty is such a vast, complex interconnected issue that every thing I’ve written feels inadequate and incomplete. I’m working on this and will write a complete piece at sometime.

However for now I can tell you what I’ve learned in regards to my main focus with Mother’s Heart Uganda, which is to empower the women economically. I started by interviewing mothers in the community at their homes to understand their challenges and desires. From those interviews, I accumulated a list of considerations and challenges to consider when creating a program.

Here they are:

• Many women are limited to working from home because of domestic duties. For example, Mother’s Heart Uganda currently has a tailoring class. Although you can make almost double if you set up a tailoring shop in town, this is not an option for many women because they cannot be away from home for so long because of all the domestic work.

• Sometimes, women are limited to working from home because of lack of permission from the husband. Some husbands don’t want the women to leave the house as their is a culture of “always needing someone to keep home.” Sometimes it’s because men (and women) are worried that if a women moves alone, she will cheat. So some men don’t allow women to go anywhere by themselves with the exception of the water well and the local shop.
• Some professions are difficult to learn because the women had little schooling. Women are more likely to drop out of school for various reasons. Even women who completed P6 (elementary school equivalent), sometimes still struggle with literacy and basic math because of the quality of their education. Prior to my arrival, Mother’s Heart Uganda started a free tailoring class. However, many women choose not to enroll because lack of education was a problem where some women struggled to take accurate measurements.

• Starting a business does not mean you know how to make a profit. From my interviews, I was surprised how many businesses are not making a profit or making very little profit. I spent the day with Fatima, the neighbor, learning their cassava pancake business. From my calculations, the days I was there the business made a loss.
• Most businesses started do not make enough profit to sustain a family. My rough estimates say a family needs to earn roughly 4,000–5,000 Ugandan shillings per member per day (~1.5 USD). This counts food, school fees and a little savings. So a business for a family of 6 needs to earn 30,000 a day. The cassava pancake business as an example, does not meet this mark. On their best day, the most profit they can make is 6,000 shillings (barely enough for one family member). Similar stories to mandaz, samosas, cookies etc. Business that meet this mark if run well are well stocked shops (even in Mutoto), chipati stands, rolex stands. There may be more but this is what I’ve determined.

• Gender keeps women from accessing the more profitable businesses. For example, there were no women selling rolexes in Mutoto. Rolex is street food that is a chipati rolled with a simple omelette inside it. Rolex is considered a mans business for reasons still unclear to me. This is sad because rolex is a much more profitable business than the businesses I see women starting. I noticed this when I spent a day with a woman making samosas. Each samosa sells for 100 shillings. I sat with her for 3 hours while she made 100 samosas (it took her longer but I had to go). If she sold all the next day, she would earn a maximum of 10,000 shillings, (not enough to meet the mark of supporting a family), but this doesn’t even subtract the costs of making the samosas. Her profit margins are a maximum of 20 shillings per samosa, so her max profit from selling all is 2,000. Her husband however, sells rolex. Each rolex is 1,500 and I’ve estimated the profits to be ~500 per rolex sold. So if a man sells 30 rolexes, his profit is 15,000. His profit is 7.5x more than what she gets from selling all her samosas. The best margins for a food business was chipatis, although I have yet to analyze all.
• In my interviews, everyone claims the reason they can’t do “blah blah blah” is lack of capital. Although true to some extent, this isn’t the whole story. Some had started businesses in the past that failed because they don’t know how to run a business ( if you think about the level of education attainment in the village, this then makes sense).
• Small businesses aren’t resilient. I was surprised to find out how many people had profitable businesses in the past, but had to close them. I found they stopped their businesses mostly because a large, sudden expenditure had come up (normally a sickness), so they diverted money from the business to that need. Now the business has less capital to operate with and thus no longer is profitable, forcing it to close.
• Dealing with money is a male role. I was surprised to learn that even when a woman has a business, it may not be hers. Her husband gets all the money and she does all the work. So a woman starting a business does not necessarily mean she is more empowered with spending.
• Most village work is seasonal making it sometimes unreliable for maintaining a family.

So those are my findings so far. I don’t have a solution but there is a program I am trying. In the month of January, I will be starting a month long, daily hairdressing course. It hopefully will solve some of the issues tailoring had. For one, the uneducated women can still get the skill. Two, the supplies for starting are less expensive (a comb and weave vs a sewing machine and fabric). Like tailoring it can be done from home, but it is still seasonal work. It is also very profitable. I’m still collecting numbers but it seems even one very simple hair style can make a profit of 5,000 shillings. I hoping to address the poor business knowledge by incorporating business lessons into the course. I don’t know if the course will make a difference, but I will be collecting data from the women before and after to try and measure the impact. At the very least, from my interviews I know the women were very excited to learn the skill. African women, even in poverty, still spend a lot on their hair.

I hope that answer helped and I will certainly keep you posted as the program progresses.