Embracing Women Entrepreneurs So They Can Thrive
Name: Chimwemwe Chitambala
Age: 23
Business: Embrace Her
Title: Founder
Location: Lusaka, Zambia
At the end of 2019, traders knocked on Chimwemwe Chitambala’s door hoping to sell her fruits and vegetables. It was common for women traders from UNZA Veg to travel to student hostels looking to amass sales. Chimwemwe was intrigued. She engaged them in conversation, asked about their businesses and how they made money. From the start, she was amazed at their perseverance.
“From our conversations, I was hit by the fact that these people work from sunrise to sunset rushing to get orders from farms and dedicating the whole day to selling. The routine continues every day of the week yet their businesses are at the same level because of limited funds and lack of basic budgeting, saving, and borrowing information. [Not to mention] a huge scale of personal responsibilities,” Chimwemwe says.
Passionate about community development, the conversation prompted her to write a winning project concept note on young women’s social and economic empowerment, which she submitted to the Pollination Project. She was awarded a seed grant to get her company, which today is known as Embrace Her, off the ground.
Embrace Her is a youth-led social enterprise that seeks to improve social and economic development through the creation of entrepreneurship opportunities to bridge the gap of financial inclusion among young people and women in Zambia. The organization has more than five part-time volunteers, who commit their time and effort to ensuring the growing business reaches its objectives. To date, they have reached over 100 young women entrepreneurs and over 800 young people through their programming.
She knows firsthand how detrimental early-stage funding can be, so it was crucial to incorporate a funding mechanism that other women entrepreneurs can benefit from within her organization.
“Our programs are community relationship-based, where we entrust young women who are recommended by community leaders to participate in the revolving fund project that offers skills and micro-loans to them without any form of collateral,” says Chimwemwe. “We were implementing this project for the first time. Most of the people we engaged for support talked about how risky it is and that we wouldn’t recover the money as we are not getting any form of assurance from the young women. My biggest ‘a-ha moment’ was when we successfully recovered a 100 percent repayment from all the young women who enrolled for the first cohort. For us this was a pilot project that proved that women can be trusted, and they are willing to put in effort for anything that would better their well-being.”
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