Family Business Empowerment
We are working with families to help them to develop the skills and business they need to provide for their family. When we resettle a child home from the street we want to give their family the skills and start-up capital needed to provide for their children into the future. We don’t want to see children coming back to the street again because there isn’t enough to go around at home.
We identify and assess families who are most in need of our support. Most often, these are families of children who are under our Educational Support programme. We hope that by working with their families to increase their income, they will gradually be able to take over financial responsibility for caring for their child/ children fully again.
The family member has to do some prior research to develop their business idea, and then attends our training course where they learn the basic skills they need in order to run a business successfully.
During this time, they create individual business plans based on their local market research with each of the participants and once they have completed the training, we visit them at home and help them set up the business.
We choose to give a small start-up grant to do this rather than a loan, as we don’t want to trap the family in a cycle of debt, but instead for them to use their money to support their children and grow their business.
We carry out monthly (or more regular if needed) follow-ups of each participant to offer them advice and guidance on how to grow the business or make it more successful.
We also link them together to mentor and support each other and offer additional training days based on their needs.
How the programme has helped Mama Junior
Mama Junior is one of our biggest success stories of the project so far. She started selling bread from a small market stall in Jinja town and has since grown the business and is now renting an old car which she uses to sell the bread from. Before joining the programme, she was earning just 3,000 shillings per week (around £1) and she now makes around 10,000 to 15,000 Ugandan shillings profit per day (around £4).
She has now enrolled all her children into school, no longer needs help with educational support from S.A.L.V.E. and is saving towards buying her own plot of land. She is even employing her sister and is inspiring and mentoring our new programme members with her success story.
Whilst providing a skill and an income for these women was the initial focus of the project, S.A.L.V.E.’s work went much deeper than that.
We supplied them with an education in areas such as:
- numeracy
- literacy
- business skills
- health and hygiene
- and the opportunity to build strong support networks with the other women in the group.
In 2014, after doing the group project for three years, we were able to support these women to develop and expand their own small businesses and become fully independent of S.A.L.V.E.
Some of these businesses are still in crafts and others in other areas such as retail and farming.
These women are all doing well with their own businesses and we regularly follow-up on the progress of them and their families.
We continue to buy craft products from their individual businesses wherever possible depending on the market we have for the items.
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