By Mulengera Reporters
Famously known as GROW Project, the Generating Growth Opportunities and Productivity for Women Enterprises intervention by the GoU is a Private Sector Foundation Uganda (PSFU) initiative aimed at boosting and further capacitating thousands of Uganda’s women entrepreneurs to growth and excellence.
Valued at $217m/roughly Shs819bn, the 5-year project evidences the World Bank & GoU’s commitment to deliberately enhance access to entrepreneurial support and services capable of empowering the country’s female entrepreneurs to expand their businesses.
According to PSFU/GROW project available information, GROW is a collaborative initiative that is being implemented on behalf of the GoU by the Ministry of Gender, Labor, and Social Development along with the Private Sector Foundation Uganda (PSFU); leveraging World Bank funding.
As President Museveni said in Kiruhura on 8th March 2023 as he launched GROW on Women’s Day, the project is here to harness female entrepreneurs’ access to the relevant business training opportunities, appropriate business formalization capabilities and low-interest credit for female entrepreneurs in Uganda. The objective is to ensure women entrepreneurs, business founders and leaders can access affordable credit at an interest rate that doesn’t exceed 10.5% without any additional charges.
There are clear indications that since its launch (barely 15 months ago), the GROW project has supported, impacted and capacitated significant numbers of women entrepreneurs. This support has manifested by way of being accessed to business training opportunities and exposure to international benchmarking trips besides facilitating them to establish life-changing networks and collaborations.
GROW ENABLES WOMEN TO BENCHMARK SAUDI ARABIA’S FOOD MARKET: As part of this initiative, a 10-member team of women entrepreneurs in Uganda’s locally grown food industry received support from the GROW project to travel for a market feasibility survey in Saudi Arabia. This survey, according to Nankwanga, was aimed at identifying potential markets besides provision of practical experience in international trade; ultimately guiding future export trade from Uganda.
Ms Sarah Namubiru, the group’s team leader, asserts that during the survey, they discovered that Ugandan products have a significant potential market demand in Saudi Arabia. This implies that there is need for an international marketing strategy to create additional visibility. The impressive demonstration of the Ugandan food products samples resulted into buyers promptly placing orders at exciting prices during the benchmarking visit.
SUPPORTING WOMEN COFFEE ENTREPRENEURS TO CHICAGO: Nankwanga explains that the GROW project also supported a group of female coffee entrepreneurs to participate and exhibit during the annual international coffee expo dubbed ‘the Specialized Coffee of America Expo.’ This was in Chicago, United States of America, earlier this year 2024. During the exhibition, the Ugandan team showcased our country’s coffee in various packaging and products besides learning from the industry’s leading players on how to improve their coffee-related practices back home.
Ms Annet Nyakaiki, a barista, is one of the women coffee dealers who travelled to Chicago to benchmark best industry practices. She asserts that she discovered that the inconsistent professional cleaning of coffee machines has a lot to do with the inconsistent taste of Ugandan coffee.
That in Uganda, only one firm deals in professional coffee machine cleaning detergent, making it hard for most baristas to appropriately clean the machines as frequently as would be ideal. Remedially, having had the exposure, she is now more than determined to pool resources and start importing cleaning detergents to Uganda and East Africa. Ms Nyakaiki also discovered that to succeed as a coffee dealer in the international market, one needs to combine numerous professional industry skills across all stages of production.
As a result, upon returning home, she has since enrolled for a six-month coffee specialty course to improve her trade and become more competitive in the industry. Her aim is to gain a fast-mover advantage by becoming one of the few coffee specialty experts in Uganda.
WOMEN FOOTBALLERS TRAIN TO INTEGRATE SPORT & BUSINESS: GROW Project also supported the Federation of Uganda Football Association (FUFA) women footballers to undergo a month-long training and thereby capacitating them to integrate football as a professional sport and a business at the same time.
The training they participated in targeted active and former female players in the country across the eight different FUFA Regions. Ms Esther Nakayenga, the training coordinator, said that the support they got from GROW was catalyzed them to envisage a future where women footballers can participate internationally in the football industry as players and as part of a business with clear goals and strategies.
All said and done, it ought to be elaborated that GROW is a GoU project that was put in place in response to the needs of women entrepreneurs who want to grow their businesses and sustain their self-employment status while creating more new jobs primarily for their fellow Ugandans. Nankwanga explains that the Project Development Objective (PDO) is to increase access to entrepreneurial services that enable the country’s female entrepreneurs to grow their enterprises in targeted locations; including in refugee-hosting districts (RHDs).
