Women’s Enterprise Day is truly inspiring!

On Thursday 17th September we held the annual Cress Women’s Enterprise Day with 10 women attending from around the local area. The day was brilliantly orchestrated by Golda Poni, the Cress Enterprise Officer in South Sudan. Golda’s story is truly amazing on its own but her success over the past few years has been exceptional. She has spent 3 years at University in Uganda and will be graduating in October with a Business and Economics degree. A year ago I met Golda in Entebbe where she updated us on the work she’d being doing for Cress on a part time basis with the women. Even then it was evident that she was one ‘smart cookie’ and someone we wanted to help CRESS out in the future. A year on and we were there in Kajo Keji, with Golda now a full time Cress employee, running the Women’s Conference. It’s great for me (Adrian) because it was fun working with Golda on a subject I have some experience in.

We covered Business Basics, Marketing, Selling and Bookkeeping during  the day – a long day but really worth-while. The best bit was when we were discussing the problem of wholesalers selling vegetables directly and making it impossible for them to make money when one bright spark came up with the idea of the 10 women pooling their resources and setting up their own wholesale business. Genius! They all got very excited by the idea and agreed to get together, under Golda’s stewardship, to follow up on the idea.

The women have been only going a few years and one of them, Florence, set up a knitting business which one year ago had a contract with a local school to knit 1,500 jumpers. A year later she has contracts with 2 more schools and has set up a tea room! When we were discussing pricing with Florence she said she had a problem because after she does the initial sale she struggles to conclude the sale because that involves writing things down and she didn’t learn to write at school. Other women were busy with agricultural products and we’re getting excited about the prospect of working with Send-A-Cow in South Sudan with the first training sessions planned for the end of this month.

We ended the day with an impromptu African song which was fabulous and I wish I could share it with you. So musical and joyful.

I got far more out of my day with these inspirational women that are battling against the odds, dealing with droughts, bringing up kids (3 came to the conference!) and being South Sudan’s answer to Richard Branson than they would have got out of my talk about the 4 Ps of marketing!

Adrian Burholt