One Entrepreneur Matters: Margaret’s Story

Below is an article about an entrepreneur in the Partners Worldwide global network. During this year of Carrasco Family Sabbatical, I’m working with Partners Worldwide as an associate director, helping with communications and networking and anything else they’ll let me get my hands on. It’s a great group of people doing unique work. You hear a lot of talk about “business as mission” and “marketplace ministries” as well as “great commission business.” A fair amount of the discussion is centered around ideas, visions and plans. It’s not as often that you get case-study level accounts of actual business as mission entities. You might consider Partners Worldwide as “boots on the ground” for the business as mission movement. Partners provides opportunities for entrepreneurs, businesspeople, and professional to volunteer their professional and business skills to help others grow their businesses. This is a unique effort because successful businesspeople are usually asked to write a check only, when they often have much more to contribute beyond cold cash (they have enough of some skills to generate that cash, after all). Partners has 45 affiliate partnerships in 20 countries and hundreds of volunteers like Margaret. Read on…

ONE ENTREPRENEUR MATTERS: Margaret’s Story
By Jacqueline Klamer, Partners Worldwide

At the age of 8, Ugandan entrepreneur Margaret Aloyo started a business, growing and selling fresh vegetables and orange juice sweetened with cane sugar. Because she was a girl, her father didn’t pay for her schooling. “I paid for schooling for my sisters and my brothers up to university,” she describes, “which taught me to work and depend on my own.”

Thirty years later, her business, Blessed Organic Relief, is approaching new heights. Today, she provides opportunity for 700 farmers – mostly women and youth in existing agricultural cooperatives – to supply her business with cash crops including peanuts, sesame seeds, and shea nuts to process the moisturizer cream, shea butter.

Through the training and mentoring Margaret provides each cooperative, the women are discovering the bounty reaped by working together – not just a sustainable income, but a new sense of purpose and dignity within their own families.

“Women used to collect the shea nut wild, but now they are farming it because they weren’t finding enough,” describes Margaret. “If they grow it, they are excited because then they can pay the school fees for their own children, which we then deposit to their bank accounts which we helped them to open.”

She also mentors them spiritually. “At the end of the day, we sit down together and read scripture. Some don’t know how to pray, so we just sit and say what they want to say, and then at the end I say, ‘In the name of Jesus, Amen.’”

Nana Yaa Dodi, Partners Worldwide’s Regional Facilitator for East Africa, has witnessed Margaret’s passion for women’s empowerment first hand. “Many women Margaret works with feel affirmed and empowered in building their own communities,” she says. “The very way she lives her life displays Christ. She is using her business to answer a need, so that people are drawn to the understanding that Christianity is not just of the spirit, but of the whole body.” They met last summer upon visiting another Partners Worldwide affiliate Margaret has volunteered to mentor-a female cooperative processing the high nutritional value grain, amaranth, in the northern town of Mbale.

Margaret sees the Partners Worldwide network and regional conferences as a key factor in her approach to business, especially after she raised her standards of packaging and product quality to meet her target international market in Kenya, Rwanda, and Burundi. “I am one who really benefitted with my association with Partners Worldwide,” says Margaret. “When we had the regional conference, we were able to meet with different people from different countries. Through this networking, I can do far more and reach new goals.” In addition, she is communicating with a North American businessperson through Partners Worldwide to establish a food-processing seminar to strengthen value-added production businesses in Uganda.

Seeing the outcome of employment through the cooperatives she trains, Margaret is encouraged to continue. “As a child, I was always willing to work with someone, asking, ‘show me how to do this, teach me how this works,’” she says, and then adds, “My hope is that all these groups will come to learn accountability, reestablish their work ethics and learn to work for themselves.”

Dig it, my friends.