In Nicaragua, Iveth Juárez, a small business owner who processes and sells cereal to the local market, had attended seminars, workshops, courses and training sessions on accounting and finance. But at the end of each session, she always felt the same sense of confusion.
Henry Gaga is a Food Technology Specialist with TechnoServe in Malawi. In that role, Henry works with the African Alliance for Improved Food Processing, a program funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development that TechnoServe is implementing in Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania and Zambia in partnership with Partners in Food Solutions (a nonprofit created by General Mills, with core members Cargill and DSM).
Cecilia Natike, 25, is the proud owner of a beauty salon in the Mathare slum of Nairobi, Kenya. She opened her business in 2009 after participating in TechnoServe’s Young Entrepreneurs program, which equips adolescent girls in Nairobi's slums with the entrepreneurship skills and support they need to build successful businesses and transform their lives.
Evelyn Windhager Swanson, a longstanding supporter of TechnoServe, writes about her travels in Rwanda.
Brighton Makuvaza is the administrator of TechnoServe’s Agro Innovation Zimbabwe business plan competition in Harare, Zimbabwe. In that role, Brighton has helped coordinate every aspect of the program. The experience has shown him the promise of the agricultural sector to change lives in poor areas of Zimbabwe.
African agriculture is poised for a boom. Investors are buying large tracts of land at a growing pace as commodity prices rise and the overall business climate improves in Africa. But will this activity translate into higher rural incomes and a better quality of life for Africa’s hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers?
A TechnoServe staffer writes about her experience at a TechnoServe training workshop for cotton farmers in Swaziland.
When setting out to design a basic finance course that could be useful across the myriad programs TechnoServe executes, we decided to try something a little different than the traditional workshop model.
In just two years, Jemima Akusika Hansen has risen from a part-time data entry clerk to the head of human resources at a cashew factory in Ghana. Her progress demonstrates how the cashew industry can create new opportunities for thousands of women in West Africa.
Mozambicans love their chicken. But in 2005, there was a good chance that the galinha found in Mozambique supermarkets was imported illegally after sitting in Middle Eastern supermarkets for a year or more. Domestically produced poultry accounted for only a third of the market.
TechnoServe saw an opportunity to promote economic growth by developing the poultry industry, launching a comprehensive program in 2005 that brought together public and private partners. Last week, a delegation from the Mozambican poultry industry visited Washington to describe the tremendous impact of this program.
