When future business women decided to start their very exciting entrepreneurship journey
A wise man ones said “to be is to do” well, young women of Iringa demonstrated this by their courageous decision to become entrepreneurs well equipped in entrepreneurship skills, sexual reproductive health rights knowledge and how to cooperate their businesses with digital word through digital tools
So this last 4 weeks became ‘’mchakamchaka” mchakamchaka is a Swahili word for jogging, meaning this last month was a non resting month since there were so much to do aiming at letting the society of Iringa know what is inspire100 so as to find applicants who are willing to be part of Inspire100
EVENTS
with an aim of recruiting, the team had to go through a series of events :
GETTING THE GOVERNMENT PERMIT (getting the government blessing)
It is a good thing to obey the lawful authority and it is even better to get the government’s go ahead before starting the project. So the project coordinator, Mr. Damian Mapunda introduced the project to the regional commissioner Hon. Amina Masenza and the response was good.
PUBLIC ANNOUCEMENT
This is where the famous inspire100 was introduced to the society at large, the team used a variety of channels to introduce the project such as community radio, flyers and social medias.
These channels were so effective since 58.1%, 19.4% and 20.3% of applicants did know the project through Radio, social medias and flyers respectively, and the remaining few did hear about it through other applicants
APPLICATION
After the whole process of public announcing applications started to show up from each and every corner of the region and from women of various ages between 15 to 35 years of age, women with running business and business ideas as well, women from different marital statuses and women with different education levels
In terms of age variation, applicants who were between 15 to 19 were 19.5% of all applicants and applicants with age between 20 to 35 were 79.9% and so wanted to try their luck even though their age was above 35 and are considered to be not suitable candidates for the project, but lucky enough there was no underage applicants
73.2% of these women who applied are located in Iringa urban, and other 26.8% from other districts: Iringa rural, Mafinga and kilolo
The statistics showed that about 55.7% of these applicants do own mobile phones with internet and 40.3% of them do own mobile phones but with no internet, leaving 4% with no mobile phones at all
EPILOGUE
After all these events the project is taking on next steps as scheduled, the applicants are already contacted to begin the hackathon stage of the project
By Sylus M. Thomas
