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When your culture denies you the opportunity to get an education, own property, or even make decisions about your own body, the chances of you starting a business are slim. For women in northern Kenya, this is a reality that perpetuates the poverty cycle, prevents them from becoming decision-makers, entrepreneurs and agents of change. This gender-based cultural suppression isn’t just bad for women, it’s bad for men and the economy too .
How then, does a 30 year-old Samburu woman with no literacy skills, seven children to support and household chores that include walking 10 kilometers to fetch water everyday - go on to do a US$ 20,000 business deal with the upscale grocery retailer, Whole Foods?
The Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT) is an NGO that by its very nature challenges stereotypes - starting with scale. It is a network of 33 community conservancies that together cover 17,000 square miles of semi-arid rangelands northern Kenya. In the first article of this series, I describe the community conservation movement, and set out how NRT is supporting this through funding, training and enterprise development. The trust’s for-profit social enterprise, NRT Trading, focuses solely on growing sustainable businesses within the conservancies, one of which is BeadWORKS.
BeadWORKS was the first NRT Trading business to be established, and has used the conservancy structure both as a catalyst for women-focused enterprise, and as leverage when approaching investors and business partners. Women are increasingly represented on the conservancy boards, and women’s enterprise groups are now enjoying a new legitimacy, giving them, often for the first time, a voice in their community.
The business builds on the traditional beading skills of women in conservancies, offering further training in craftsmanship, product development, and basic marketing and accounting skills. Products include jewelry, homeware and decorative pieces, and are sold on behalf of the women by NRT Trading to customers both in-region and overseas - most recently to Whole Foods.
There are now over 1,200 women involved in BeadWORKS, who earned over $75,000 in 2016 – a significant sum in these remote communities. The business model is predicated on a grass-roots production chain that is wholly owned by the women’s groups themselves. They work together and help identify Star Beaders within their group, women with leadership and entrepreneurial skills who then oversee production, perform quality control and collect finished products. There is one Superstar Beader appointed to coordinate all the Star Beaders of a particular region.
The majority of the women involved in the business faced initial resistance from their husbands. “The men were against it,” Seki Lakango, a Star Beader from Westgate Community Conservancy, told me. “They thought us women were shunning our traditional responsibilities. But as soon as they saw us go into town and buy nice clothes and food for our families, they asked how their own wives could get involved in what we were doing.”
There are hundreds of bead-based NGO initiatives across Africa, so why is this any different? While it empowers women, BeadWORKS plays a critical role in reducing reliance on a volatile livestock market - the main livelihood of these pastoral communities. It also aims to provide an alternative to selling charcoal, an illegal but default business for many families in desperate times. Both of these have clear links to the conservation goals of the conservancies to which the women belong. They are well aware that their conservancy provides the platform for a thriving enterprise, and pay 5% of their business revenue to the conservancy every year, a contribution to the conservancies’ operational costs.
The financial literacy training women can access through the business also makes them eligible for micro-loans, funded through the newly developed NRT Savings and Credit Cooperative Organisation (SACCO). This has inspired entrepreneurship from women like Noong’uta Lemarle, who took out a $120 loan to buy a solar panel. People in her village now pay her a small fee to charge their mobile phones.
The impact of more empowered women on the socio-economic landscape of northern Kenya will be hard to quantify, although anecdotally it is very powerful. 86% of women in Sub-Saharan Africa are currently in vulnerable employment, compared with 70% of men. Yet one study found that closing the gender gap in labour in South Africa could result in a gross impact of 17% on the country's GDP. Not to mention the ripple effect of an economically empowered woman on her family’s healthcare and education potential.
“I truly love my work because it is power. Beading is in my heart and I feel richer in many ways” Juliwana Lengili, Star Beader from the Ngutu Group, told me.
To scale up the benefits of BeadWORKS requires market expansion. The business is currently trying to develop partnerships with new impact investors, with an ambitious vision to reach 3,400 women across 20 conservancies, with business turnover of US$ 550,000 in the next 5 years. Material and shipping costs continue to challenge this target, but deals with retail giants like Whole Foods prove this isn’t just possible, it is an achievable reality for traditionally suppressed women daring to dream.
