East Africa

I will never forget my first night in Kalawa village. As I sat down to a dimly lit meal of goat stew, a thousand thoughts raced through my head...

The 54-member farming cooperative began working with TechnoServe in August 2010 to improve their business skills and diversify into a new market opportunity: purple passion fruit. With TechnoServe’s assistance, Tiret Self-Help Group built a passion fruit nursery and sowed the first seeds in December 2010. As the first vines begin…

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.

The 39-year-old mother of four grew food crops to feed her family, but earned little income from her tomato crop because of poor quality and limited access to markets. Martha, like many farmers in her community, had no choice but to accept the low prices offered by…

https://youtube.com/watch?v=bdJqDAlKv-E Pascasie Mukagasana has known great hardship. She was separated from her children and her husband, Athanase Nzigiyimana, for a year following the 1994 Rwanda genocide. They reunited, only to lose a son to illness. In 1998, Athanase was wrongfully imprisoned for 10 years. Alone with her children, Pascasie struggled…

Margaret Wambui Ngure used to consider dairy farming an inadequate way to earn a living. No matter how hard they tried, Margaret and her husband couldn’t turn a sustainable profit with their herd of indigenous cattle. Traditional breeds often produce as little as one gallon per cow per day,…

“The year 2002 was the hardest of our lives,” Cecilia Kapinga recalls. Her oldest daughter was sick and needed an operation that cost the family their entire annual income. To allow their daughter to finish high school, Cecilia and her husband Filoteus were forced to sell off all their livestock,…

For more than 30 years, Specioza Kakweezi has grown the plantain-like banana known as matooke on her one-acre farm in the hills of southwestern Uganda. Specioza, a widow, once grew matooke simply to feed her family. Today, she has turned her farm into a profitable business – and a…

Using the business skills she learned through Young Women in Enterprise, 24-year-old Cecilia Katungwa (left) launched a a shop selling knitted goods.  TechnoServe recently received a new grant from the Nike Foundation to continue an initiative to economically and socially empower young women in Kenya through 2012. The Young…

Gerald and Rosemary Muthomi grew up in poor farming families on the foothills of Mt. Kenya. Determined to improve people's lives, they became government agricultural advisors. But they soon realized that it wasn't enough for small-scale farmers to grow more produce; they also needed opportunities to sell it to…