“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…
The Connected Farmer Alliance (CFA) is a public-private partnership that seeks to promote commercially sustainable mobile agriculture solutions and increase productivity and revenues for 500,000 smallholder farmers across Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique. The program also aims to increase revenues for agribusinesses and agricultural value chain service providers.
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.
Evelyn Windhager Swanson, a longstanding supporter of TechnoServe, writes about her travels in Rwanda.
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 honor of International Cooperative Day, we look inside one Kenyan cooperative that has restructured its labor practices to improve safety and working conditions.
