Atuharire to women: Shift from handouts to business investment

You seemed so focused in training businesswomen and entrepreneurs. Why is that so important to you?Uganda has been ranked by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor as one of the most entrepreneurial countries in the world with 30 percent of Ugandans starting businesses annually. But not many of those businesses celebrate their first birthday. 
Guess what, businesses with the highest mortality rate –those that don’t survive beyond a year are women start-up. They generally have low growth prospects, little room to innovate, or even enough product lines to bring plus issues of poor bookkeeping, and lack of proper access to markets. This is the gap we are filling. And how else can this be closed if not through training. 
How relevant are the trainings you are fashioning?We try to be hands-on and address the real challenges. We do this professionally. For example, we have been running a women in export accelerator programme to help firm women’s hands in export businesses where there are fairly lucrative returns. We discovered that women exporters in Uganda are less than 5 percent, so we set out to grow their business, scale their Impact, facilitate investment fundraising and link them to regional and international markets after training them. Without training and access to a pool of funds, the accelerated companies can easily fail to be impactful.
Speaking of the market, which ones are you talking about?We would want to see to it that businesswomen and entrepreneurs, many of whom are in the micro, small and medium enterprise (MSME) sector, have access to the EU market. There is also the Canadian market that we have been looking at for a while now, not to mention the African continental free trade area market – why not?
How do you get them there? We must get them ready for the market. That is where training becomes handy. Having women formalise their businesses is important even as a prerequisite for our training. once you are formally running your business, the next step after training is to see that you get ready to access international markets. At this point, we would have firmed your hands on proper packaging, branding, raising enough needed export volumes, and standards required or suitable for both local and international markets.
Any specific sectors you have in mind and is there any cost involved for the women?We are expecting women in food systems, processing or agri-food value chain at any level and importantly perhaps the women should be ready to learn. Essentially the accelerator works with innovative enterprises that are aligned within agribusiness value chains directly or even indirectly.You spoke about the cost, we are of the view that ownership and seriousness towards the program can be derived when the beneficiaries contribute a percentage towards the training.
So you mean women will make some cash contribution, is that fair?Women must quickly realise that building sustainable business or for any income-generating enterprise means they must very quickly transition from freebies or handouts to investing in building their businesses. Contributing just a fraction towards acquiring knowledge that if used well will elevate your business to greater heights is not too much to ask. This is part of the mindset change that we are trying to impart into businesswomen and entrepreneurs no matter their level of operations and development. 
Expecting free things will derail growth and development of businesses run by women. Women should try to build their business, including investing in their skills. This model is not only logical but also fulfilling because when you make a payment towards the information you are going to receive you tend to attach value to it, and you also take it seriously. For someone looking to access the international market, you ought to know that investment in information is vital. For the training we are going to offer we will make a percentage of the contribution and we will require the trainee to contribute for reasons I have explained and all the benefits they will accrue.
What did you learn about the Canadian market while they were attending an expo? When we attended a food expo in Canada this year in May alongside 15 other women looking to export, we learned that there are particular ways of packaging unlike what we are used to back home here or across most parts of the EA region. Plastic packages are not acceptable for high-end international markets yet it is common back home. These are some of the things we need to be aware of. Also, labeling is important. It should be able to tell an authentic inspirational story. We also discovered demand for value-added products. So instead of fresh bananas why not make powdered bananas if you can?In that food expo, we were able to actually realise that Uganda has good products, our shea butter is unique and it generated an instant market. There was also love for our fruits. 
There was also visible love and inquiry about our vanilla and coffee. Everybody was talking about these products.That was just a day after having our first training to understand all that there is also so much paperwork that we need to have in place before the product reaches the market. The good news is that at least three of the women signed contracts to export because they were able to learn. That is what we are trying to emphasize. Importantly, in our trip to Canada, we realised that physical meetings generate trust and therefore easy to work together.