Life And Work Reimagined: The Team of Women Adapting to the Times In Rwanda
ODETH
When you walk into a mid-market salon in Kigali, Rwanda, there is a high chance that you’ll find women working from compact corners, braiding customers, or polishing their nails. These women are freelancers paying a monthly rent of about 100 dollars to work from the fringes of salons. Odeth is one of these women. She braids out of a salon in Kicukiro, a lively district in South-Eastern Kigali.
At 33, Odeth is a single mother of a four-year-old daughter. Having dropped out of school after her primary education due to financial constraints, work options available to her have been few and limited to the informal sector. Since learning hairdressing 8 years ago, she has stayed on that course, improving her craft and learning to communicate and maintain relationships with her customers.
Despite her skill and experience, Odeth has had to grapple with the challenge of low-income margins in her line of work. With multiple freelance hairdressers in one salon, customers are spoilt for choice, hence the predominance of highly reduced price bargains. Due to this, despite working late hours, Odeth has meager savings and is weighed down by impending school fees as her daughter has reached school age. For the longest time, this was her major financial burden until a pressing concern arose with the coronavirus spread and the ensuing lockdown.
A lockdown was declared in Kigali on March 21st, 2020. The panic and fear that gripped residents wasn’t solely triggered by the ravaging coronavirus. It was also a product of financial limitation, for low-income earners, wage workers, women, and single mothers like Odeth.
FIONAH
On many nights at the onset of the lockdown in Kigali, Fionah Umulisa, a Business Associate at Palladium Rwanda, stayed up pondering how to assist those whose lives have been gravely affected by the restrictions. By mid-April, when it seemed the world was at the grimmest point of the pandemic, Fionah was still in constant thought. Having founded an NGO, Education4Girls, which donated sanitary items and groceries to women in rural communities between 2016 and 2018, she was well-aware of the limits of palliative aid. She believed a sustainable solution would have to create enablement and access so that those who are able to work can go on making a living.
It struck her, finally, on a day she moaned that her hair was due for a restyle, that there was an opportunity to reimagine access and provision of beauty services in light of the new world order. She believed that even after an eased lockdown, it wouldn’t be ‘business as usual’ for hair care and beauty services as far as small salons were concerned. The compact sizes of these salons meant clutter, poor hygiene, and little to no room for social distancing.
Spurred by the possibility to solve a real need, Fionah ran a survey on social media to understand the beauty needs of women in Rwanda in light of the coronavirus. Based on her survey findings, she set out to create a solution, but first, she had to check-in with the women at the heart of the problem she was solving. She scheduled calls with hairstylists and nail therapists she had built relationships with, most of whom worked out of small salons in the Kicukiro and Kabeza districts of Kigali.
The calls moved her. The women were distressed by the suspension of their sole means of livelihood; they were afraid of what the future held for them. However, they were enlivened by her desire to create a solution, a digital solution that could link them to customers as soon as they were able to work again. Odeth was one of the hairstylists she spoke to. With 8 hairstylists and 4 nail therapists, their team was formed, a collaboration that birthed Hygge Africa, an online home salon booking platform.
Hygge Africa connects women in need of home-based beauty services with skilled stylists/therapists. Officially launched on the 4th of May 2020 when Rwanda’s 44-day long lockdown was eased, the team underwent training on safety standards, after which they were given home kits — knapsacks with hand sanitizers, nose masks, and gloves. It was the dawn of a new season, a marker of work continuity, a chance for each woman to sustain herself and her family again.
In three weeks, Hygge Africa connected the team with 50 customers for home-based braiding, manicure, and pedicure. As a business, it earns from commissions, with the stylists/therapists earning 85 percent of total service payments. The team’s growth — in leadership, open-mindedness and flexibility — has been Fionah’s biggest joy. “But those first three weeks came with challenges too,” she adds, “Because motorcycles were suspended, every visit to a customers’ home required two round trips on taxis.” At the onset, the steep transport costs raised their service costs and deterred a number of potential customers who would rather have it cheaper. Fionah mentions that they tackled this by assigning stylists and therapists to clients closer to their homes.
ODETH
Odeth never imagined that a day would come when customers would get to her through the internet. On the call with Fionah before Hygge Africa was launched, she was particularly happy about the system of fixed prices. It raised her hopes about earning better and finally being able to save in order to guarantee education for her daughter. Speaking of her interactions with other teammates, she mentions that they are all happy to have adapted to the changes in customer needs due to coronavirus.
On these changes and the product of their teamwork, one of her teammates, Esther, a 35-year-old nail therapist, says, “Working with the team has made customers trust me more. When I go to a customer’s house with my verification tag, they take me seriously, unlike before when they would doubt my capability because I was on my own.”
