The objective of this action research project will be to understand the entrepreneurship issues of local women of Mukuru slum from their perspective and to –together with them and other local
stakeholders- find, co-create and implement interventions to tackle these major challenges. Through this, we aim to contribute to the improvement of livelihoods of female entrepreneurs and their families through better financial access to resources for basic needs and social services.
-Insights into causal links & sociocultural context of poverty among women entrepreneurs in Nairobi, Kenya
-Insight into locally provided solutions to this problem
-Founding ‘The Female Entrepreneurship Community’, where a group of women meet twice a month to continue to learn from each other, inspire each other and help develop themselves further.
Loice Wambui, local researcher, reported about this:
“The training that was offered to females in lungalunga by 7Senses was very helpful. We gained a lot in terms of knowledge and networking. The following are the impact and outcome after the Female Entrepreneurship Challenge that ended in 2016:
1.Competition
After the training, the members gained ideas from different members. Some copied ideas from others where it created demand and competition due to the same type of business. In other words, due to high demand of the products it created competition in a positive way.To me this was a positive thing since different individuals had different styles of doing same
business.
2. Network platform
The training created a network platform where members would sell their product and get new networks from friends and family of different members, also during our quarterly meeting I could invite different agencies like youth funds and other funding agencies to
come and facilitate on their products to encourage the members and see if they can get individual loans,but am still working on that since to get individual loan is difficult
3.job creation
Some members have created job opportunities to other community members, for example, those who own a kiosk have created opportunities and some have more for marketing jobs.
4. New innovations
Members gained ideas from different members and some copied ideas from others where it created demand and competition hence new innovations from different members came out depending on customers. Other like myself have registered a cleaning company with several members to do office cleaning, carpet cleaning, gardening and also the laundry which we just started recently but so as to offer employment for other mums and also earn a living.”
