WECREATE Center opens doors to Women Entrepreneurs

The Women’s Entrepreneurial Centers of Resources, Education, Access, and Training for Economic Empowerment (WECREATE) was launched last week with US Ambassador Robert Godec, and joins a number of other centers lunched to help empower women by promoting entrepreneurship opportunities globally, tailored to provide education and tools specifically to help women. The center is one of three announced by President Obama during the Global Entrepreneurship Summit in July, 2015. Read more at the link, follow WECREATE Kenya on Twitter at @WECREATEKENYA, or visit the center online to learn more.

herbusiness.co.ke - The WECREATE center opened its doors last week, launched by the US Ambassador, Bob Godec. The centre aims to mentor and empower women entrepreneurs.

Based in Lavington, the centre is a fulfillment of one of the promises made by President Barack Obama during last year’s Global Entrepreneurship Summit held in Nairobi last year.

The WECREATE Kenya Women Entrepreneurship Center is a project of the United States Department of State and the Caterpillar Foundation.

“The center should collaborate with public institutions in enhancing the skills of businesswomen and expanding their businesses beyond the borders,” Said Sicily Kariuki, the Public Service Cabinet Secretary.

The WECREATE Center is the second one to be opened in Africa and it serves as an entrepreneurial community center for women interested in starting or expanding an existing business. The Center provides mentoring, business connections, specialized training, connections to the community, media attention, access to markets and capital along with the technical tools and resources necessary for taking any business to the next level.

Read the rest here.

Essential Read: Impact with Wings

We know many of you are sure to be interested in the new anthology book now available for pre-order on Amazon, Impact With Wings: Stories to Inspire and Mobilize Women Angel Investors and Entrepreneurs. We discovered it through the recommendation of Lionesses of Africa, an online community fostering women’s entrepreneurship in Africa.  Read an excerpt of Lionesses' endorsement here, and click through to learn much more about the book and its authors, female impact investors who came together to co-found Wingpact, a global community of investors and entrepreneurs united in a vision to get more women involved in angel investing and entrepreneurship. 

lionessesofafrica.com - Look out for the launch shortly on Amazon of the wonderfully titled Impact With Wings: Stories to Inspire and Mobilize Women Angel Investors and Entrepreneurs. It’s an anthology of personal stories and research written by six female impact investors. This book's purpose is to enlighten and inspire women to step into angel investing and/or entrepreneurship, as it is through investing in each other that we can begin to tip gender imbalances and bring more women forward.

“As women achieve greater financial success, they are looking for projects they can support on behalf of women. Impact with Wings covers a timely topic of interest for more women than ever. It is an extremely valuable and thought-provoking narrative, coupled with practical information on financing.” --- Dr. Marsha Firestone, President/Founder, The Women Presidents’ Organization

The authors of Impact with Wings ask a fundamental question in their book - will you settle for leaving half the world’s wealth on the table? Discovering angel investing transformed the lives of the six women who cofounded Wingpact, a global angel investment and entrepreneur community. In a world where women’s capital remains underused, angel investing—providing money, human capital, and expertise for startup or early-stage companies—offers a potent and often overlooked opportunity for women to impact the future. The authors, all of whom are well-established in the global business and investment community, share their personal stories and insiders’ insights, offering a clarion wake-up call intended to activate new women angel investors and spur women to invest in female-founded companies.

‘You’re a girl,’ and other obstacles to becoming an entrepreneur in South Africa

South Africa trails the rest of the country and continent in women entrepreneurship. Quartz Africa explores what makes the entrepreneur world so challenging for women--especially young women--and how to improve the business climate.

qz.com - “You’re a girl, you’re young.” Those words have followed Boitshoko Masetla at every turn on her journey as an entrepreneur.

At first it was her family, especially her male relatives, who believed she would be better suited to training for a stable and nonthreatening desk job. Then it was the potential investors who preferred to invest in her male colleagues’ untested technology rather than her already established bakery.

The worst was a potential mentor at an entrepreneurship skills incubator who thought the best path for her business would be to buy her out and giver her a job in the marketing department of his established confectionery.

“That’s where I learned the world of entrepreneurship is for men,” said the 23-year-old, who raised seed capital by selling ice-lollies. Today she runs a bakery from her home in Pretoria, supplying five schools in her neighborhood and supplying everything from cupcakes to bread for local events.

Her business, Sakatola Trading, employs six people and she is the sole owner after her three partners abandoned the business in the early years for more stable jobs. The only people willing to invest in her was her mother and a lecturer who realized her potential in her entrepreneurship college class.

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US opens enterprise hub in Nairobi for women

businessdailyafrica.com - Women now have a new avenue through which to start and expand their businesses after the United States government kept its word to establish a tailor-made entrepreneurial center in the country.

The U.S.-funded business center situated in Lavington, Nairobi, will provide mentoring, business connections, specialized training, access to market and capital for budding women entrepreneurs.

A number of highly practical programs aimed at accelerating growth of businesses will also be implemented at the center.

This is the brainchild of the Women’s Entrepreneurial Centers of Resources, Education, Access and Training for Economic Empowerment (WACREATE), a public-private partnership between the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs (EB) and StartUp Cup.

“The center is a wonderful resource for empowering women from all walks of life who are interested in starting a business,” US Ambassador Robert Godec said when he presided over the opening of the center last week.

“It fulfills a promise President Barack Obama made during the Global Entrepreneurship Summit in July 2015.”

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WEF is on the lookout for Africa's top five female innovators

Ventures Africa brings us this news of this year's World Economic Forum for Africa, which will highlight some stars in innovation. Read on for more. 

venturesafrica.com - This May, Africa’s female innovators and entrepreneurs will be in the spotlight based on an opportunity to represent Africa at the 2016 World Economic Forum for Africa as part of the top five role models on the continent in the area of wealth generation and economic empowerment. These five female innovators will be selected from Africa’s “brightest and best” at the discretion of a panel of experts, and will then be invited to participate in the forum at Kigali, Rwanda.

The event will take place from the 11^th to the 13^th of next month, but the search is already on to determine the crop of female innovators and entrepreneurs who would shape Africa’s next generation. And because the World Economic Forum (WEF) is “committed to improving the state of the world,” application for the challenge is not limited to individuals occupying the technology space.

Fashion designers, farmers, artists, retailers, social entrepreneurs, and other such women who have set a standard with their innovative business models and have significantly improved their societies and the lives of the people around them can all register to be one of the top five making a difference at the forum this year. This is also in the spirit of championing inclusivity in the field of innovation which up until recently has been credited to professionals in the technology space.

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Kenya tackles poverty by sending teen mothers back to school

Kenya faces high teen pregnancy rates, especially among poorer citizens--and due to demands of motherhood and stigma, most young women who drop out of school due to pregnancy never return to continue their education. Efforts to help students get and stay in school have been slow-going, even though free primary education was introduced in Kenya more than a decade ago, and the figures for secondary schooling are even more bleak. This is especially unfortunate because young mothers are among those who could benefit most from education, which helps them achieve higher earnings and have fewer, but healthier, pregnancies and babies.

Projects like Jielimishe work to change that and provide access to education for many more young women. The organization provides fees, textbooks, uniforms and sanitary towels so young women can attend and stay in school, and is also working to challenge preconceptions. Click through to read the full story.

reuters.com - Laikipia, KENYA (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Christine Gathoni dreamed of becoming a doctor, not a patient, grimacing in pain as she pushed her baby girl into the world.

But boredom and frustration at her parents' inability to pay for her education led her to sex, pregnancy and motherhood at the age of 19 with only two years of secondary education to go.

"I was idle and my boyfriend asked me out," she said, looking pensive. "After a few weeks, I realized I was pregnant."

Two out of five 19-year-old women in Kenya are either pregnant or have given birth, with the highest rates among the poorest, according to government statistics.

Their parents often encourage them to get married to escape the stigma of being a single mother.

The persistent cultural belief that girls who have given birth are adults - who have no place in a classroom - also means that as many as nine in 10 Kenyan girls who drop out of school due to pregnancy never return.

Gathoni, however, was determined to complete her education.

How Economic Activism Can Empower the African Woman

Economic activism—educating, investing in and empowering people so they can make independent, informed decisions and meaningfully participate in their economies—is a crucial part of women's rights activism. It can be just as important as political or social activism, and is interconnected with other forms of empowering women or other marginalized groups. Women continue to lag behind men in nearly every measurement financially, even though they make the majority of household financial decisions and are making serious gains on their male counterparts in terms of founding businesses and investing.

Wendy Luhabe has already succeeded in entrepreneurship, but for years now her mission has been to empower other African women entrepreneurs. She sat down with Knowledge@Wharton, the online business journal of the Wharton School; to discuss private equity for women, South Africa's changing political landscape and opportunities it provides for gender equality, how she became an economic activist and so much more.

knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu - Social and economic activist Wendy Luhabe passionately believes in empowering women, especially when it comes to realizing their potential in contributing to the economy.

Knowledge@Wharton: You describe yourself as an economic activist. You’re based in South Africa. What is an economic activist?

Wendy Luhabe: In my case, it’s focusing on the participation of women in the economy. When I thought about what we’ve been doing, I realized that you hear of social activists or political activists, but you don’t hear of economic activists. The work we’ve done deserves the description. We pioneered two ventures: the first one was an investment company we started 20 years ago. It mobilized 18,000 women to become investors for the first time through a platform called Women Investment Portfolio Holdings. The company is still in existence. It has a value of about $200 million.

After that, about 10 years later, we started a private equity fund for women, which was also an unheard of concept in the world. There are less than 10 funds that are focusing on women-owned enterprises. This was definitely the first and probably still the only one in Africa.

Knowledge@Wharton: That company still exists as well?

Luhabe: The fund has closed but several of the investments are still in existence.

Read the rest of the interview here.