Nuns, through ADN, create social enterprise startups to help African communities

By Tope Templer Olaiya, California, USA

“What I take away from the conference is that the future of Africa is in the hands of Africans. It is for us to devise our own future and I am going back home as an African to chart African solutions for Africa.”

Sister Juunza

Sister Juunza Christabel Mwangani of Emerging Farmers Initiative is one of the Religious Sisters of the Holy Spirit, a congregation of women based in Zambia and one of three Catholic sisters among 11 entrepreneurs recognised with a Builders of Africa’s Future (BAF) award in 2022 by the African Diaspora Network (ADN).

Each 2022 awardee presented their programs and received a $25,000 grant from the U.S. African Development Foundation (USADF) after completing the Start Your Social Enterprise training. This came after she participated in a Silicon Valley social enterprise ‘accelerator’ which in 2019 linked with a network of African nuns to help low-income families help themselves.

Armed with previous experience in business as well as a business degree, Mwangani is today blending her charity work with business.

Based in the southern province of Zambia, Mwangani has being a sister for the past 20 years, working as a hospital administrator and on the social enterprise sector in the country.

At the African Diaspora Investment Symposium (ADIS23), just concluded by the ADN in Silicon Valley, California, United States of America, Mwangani set the ball rolling on the opening day of ADIS23 with a fireside chat on Changemakers: Catholic Sisters on the continent.

Speaking on the significance of ADIS23, Mwangani said it was an essential follow-up to the selected entrepreneurs on the Builders of Africa’s Future project, an elite list of entrepreneurs within Africa that have shown concepts and solutions that can build the future of Africa in the sense that they have come up with innovations that are likely to change the narrative and bring out what Africa needs to grow to its potential.

She said: “We are into education for eco-friendly agriculture and entrepreneurship skills. What we are really doing is to combine agriculture skills and entrepreneurship into education because we know that when education is solely on academics only, we are likely to have more people who are looking for white collar jobs after finishing school. We are equipping them with skills so that when they walk out of class, they are not waiting for somebody to create wealth and employment for them.”

On her takeaway from ADIS23, she said: “What I take away from the conference is that the future of Africa is in the hands of Africans. It is for us to devise our own future and I am going back home as an African to chart African solutions for Africa.”

As Religious Sisters of the Holy Spirit, the nuns embraced the message behind the Sisters Blended Value Project to revive their ministries as well as improve the financial status of the institute to sustain the sisters’ life in the congregation. This entails that the ministries have a positive impact on the community by offering a solution to a problem they are facing, sustain the sisters financially and protect Mother Earth. There are currently 40 sisters in the congregation.

“In order to achieve this, we were called to turn our ministries from charities to social enterprises. However, sisters did not have enough skills to run the ministries as social enterprises, so they needed some training in business strategies,” she explained.

“With this realization, a team of three sisters (Sr. Edna Himoonde, Sr. Purity Siloka, and myself) enrolled with the Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship, for an orientation program in March 2019 in Nairobi, and in an accelerator program to prepare us and our projects for investment readiness from May to December 2020. At this time, a fourth sister was added to the team, Sr. Christerbel Mwaaba. This training helped me change the mindset from thinking that a “faith-based” organization should never charge its clients and give services for free, to realizing that every organization needs to be sustainable, so it is not wrong to attach a charge to a service rendered in order to spread the service to the underserved populations of a particular community.

“I looked forward to the weekly sessions with the mentors assigned to us by the Miller Center. By the end of the eight-month program, I was very
clear with our business plan and was ready to pitch to any investor who was ready to listen.

“While undergoing training with the Miller Center, my team and I founded the Emerging Farmers Initiative, in 2019, with the permission of the congregational leadership. Our congregation has 40 sisters and is based in the Diocese of Monze, in the southern province of Zambia. The Emerging Farmers Initiative is in Mulando village in the Nziba, Magoye area, in the same district as the motherhouse of the congregation. Nziba is in the rural part of Mazabuka District about 151 kilometers (about 94 miles) from Lusaka, the capital city of Zambia in the southern province.

“There are about 73 households in Mulando village with an average of eight members in each. The main trade is subsistence farming, cattle rearing and crop production. Due to frequent droughts and total dependence on farming, the levels of poverty are still high. The illiteracy level is also still high, estimated at 25 per cent. Half of the population in the area is under 20 years of age.

“The Emerging Farmers Initiative is meant to run in the context of a secondary school, as a production unit. Most schools focus only on academic learning. Through the Emerging Farmers Initiative — which houses our poultry, swine and egg production units; vegetable garden; fruit tree orchard; maize field and fishponds — we will offer hands-on training to our pupils and life-transforming skills to young school dropouts and young families at risk. We have had two beneficiaries of the program undergo training who are now employed by the Emerging Farmers Initiative, and we also have hired a general agriculturalist to manage the EFI and help with training. In the EFI, we prepare our students to face the real world and succeed in life while raising consciousness on preserving and replenishing Mother Earth.

“Winning the Builders of Africa’s Future Award for 2022 was the best experience ever! I felt so happy to be a participant in the fight against poverty in Africa, and in being a beacon of hope for the future of my continent. During my training as a Builder of Africa’s Future, I was paired with a mentor, who helped me know how to approach various investors. This was very helpful because the mentor spoke from his experience of being an entrepreneur. I experienced a sense of fulfillment as a person, in that, while I was acting locally, the impact will eventually spread to the whole continent, and that remains my aim. I will continue working with the younger generation in order to influence the future more positively.

“With the $25,000 that came with the BAF 2022 award, we have decided to expand the poultry project of the Emerging Farmers Initiative. This expansion will increase the production of chickens and eggs to meet the demand and to increase the revenue base of the enterprise. We intend to use it to construct a chicken run that will be used to house the chickens for meat production. This in turn will increase the production of eggs because we shall keep an increased number of layers from 500 to 1,000 at every given time.”

https://editor.guardian.ng/news/nuns-through-adn-create-social-enterprise-startups-to-help-african-communities/

The power of one: Negash creating partnerships, transforming Africa with ADN

By Tope Templer Olaiya,

Silicon Valley, California

Negash

The 1992 drama film, The Power of One, set in South Africa, tells the story of an English boy, living in Africa during World War II, who through his boxing prowess, became a symbol of hope, in a time of war.

Through the ages, one story has been constant – it is the power of hope. The power of one person – Washington, Lincoln, King, Mandela, Obama and even young Malala from Pakistan – one person changing the world by giving people hope.

This illustrates the work and vision of Ms Almaz Negash, Founder and Executive Director, the African Diaspora Network (ADN), convener of the biggest and richest gathering of African Diasporans in the United States since 2016.

At the ADN, what we preach is engaging and supporting each other. For the programmes we have created, all I ask is give one hour of your time to us to mentor the entrepreneurs, grassroots African entrepreneurs and the African Americans here. That is my plea, making a difference in one person is just the greatest thing in the world.”

Founded in 2010, ADN is a Silicon Valley-based nonprofit that promotes entrepreneurship and economic development on the African continent, with the aim of bringing together Africans on the continent, in the diaspora and friends of Africa to actualize their full potential, activate their entrepreneurial spirit and strategically mobilize financial and intellectual resources to ensure a brighter future for the African continent.

For this year’s flagship program of ADN, the African Diaspora Investment Symposium (ADIS23), the eighth edition since the signature convening began in Silicon Valley in 2016, it marked the return of in-person summit after the COVID-19 pandemic of the celebration of ingenuity and innovation of Africa’s present and future.
In November last year, to celebrate the Global Entrepreneurship Week, ADN announced 11 entrepreneurs named Builders of Africa’s Future (BAF) who received $25,000 grants from the U.S. African Development Foundation (USADF).

The funding will be used to support African organizations honoured in the BAF 2022 cohort. Each of the 11 organisations is impact-oriented, African-led and represents the healthcare, education, agriculture, renewable energy and menstrual health sectors. Since 2018, ADN has recognized and catalysed 53 African startups in five cohorts, recognizing the rising stars of African entrepreneurship as they build the continent’s future through nonprofit and for-profit businesses addressing the needs of their communities.

In an interview with The Guardian after ADIS23, which ended on Friday at the Computer History Museum, Silicon Valley, Negash described the symposium as successful, which has continued to create a platform to connect African diaspora with entrepreneurs on the continent and driving a Future Ready Africa, with the Beyond Remittances conversation.

“The conversation began at United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) last year in New York and we took it to the U.S. African Leaders Summit (USALS) in Washington in December and after ADIS23, my next stop is in Oxford, England in April, taking the conversation there and later to Pan African University to speak on the theme Beyond Remittances. Why is this important? Unless we create awareness, we are not going to engage communities. My job is to create that awareness and continue the engagement,” she said.

On the success of ADIS23, Negash enthused: “This organization stands on so many shoulders and that means I have a fall back plan, which is the people and am happy to be surrounded with such lovely people driving this vision. The event went on smoothly beyond my expectations. It is after three years, so I was thinking if people were going to show up because we have been doing this on Zoom but having this in-person summit, the engagement that we are forming and the community we are building actually inspires me.”

She further shared how the inspiring journey of ADN started and her staying power to remain resilient with the vision that has now birth a powerful engagement in Africa and the United States:

“First of all, I am an immigrant, which means as an immigrant, you have to leave everything back home. I left my country Eritrea in 1984, and everything I knew I left it behind. The fact that I made that journey in itself is part of that courage of immigrants. I live on that and if I was able to overcome having only a dollar a day in the United States, I could face anything. So, I never lost hope. It doesn’t mean in reality it is easy. It’s a very difficult journey, but I forged ahead with my internal drive.

“Once we started the first ADIS, we just couldn’t stop. We did the first one, how can we not do the second one and the third one, that is how we arrived at the eighth edition this year. In 2017, we actually had no money, I think we had only $5,000 in the bank but this year, we raised money beyond and above what we needed.

“At the ADN, what we preach is engaging and supporting each other. For the programmes we have created, all I ask is give one hour of your time to us to mentor the entrepreneurs, grassroots African entrepreneurs and the African Americans here. That is my plea, making a difference in one person is just the greatest thing in the world.”

The Biden administration has severally reiterated that its engagement with Africa is a priority, has anything come out of this promise yet?
Responding, Negash said: “It’s a good thing, though there is a lot of talk but I think there is a process and that is the point we are. I do know the Biden administration is very committed from the actions that we see, not only because of us the diasporans, but because Africa is important to the United States. After the USALS, we have been engaging with the State Department, USAID and others that are working on this issue. We are also not waiting for them to do the action, we are taking the proactive action of taking Beyond Remittances everywhere.

“As diasporans, waiting for the government to make this work is not going to happen, we need to own it. The diaspora is in a space of innovation, investment and capital development and we need to engage these resources for the maximum benefit of Africans. Going through the EY Africa Attractiveness Report shared at the symposium, the Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) to Africa plus any aid that comes to Africa is way less than the $80 billion remittances that goes to the continent. Think about it, it is huge. And it’s not going to stop, because if my relatives ask me for money, I will do everything I can to give it to them, but it is not enough, it is not scalable, because this is going from one family to the other. What we are asking is can we tap into the savings that we have and start to think and imagine other ways we can invest in the continent and this is a huge opportunity for the diaspora to make a difference in the continent.

“We are not changing anything or reinventing the wheel, we are just enhancing what’s there and calling to action all diasporans to go and do something for the continent. However, the governments of Africa, the 54 governments, need to create a conducive ecosystem for the diasporans to come in, from the tech investor diasporans in Silicon Valley, California to the big financiers in New York, connected big diasporans in Washington DC and some energy folks in Houston, all of these groups are important to the future of Africa.”

On a last note, her parting shot is: “I will urge the media to tell our stories and be authentic about it. When we fail we must talk about it but it’s not the end of it. We need to change the narrative about Africa.”

“The power of one: Negash creating partnerships, transforming Africa with ADN | The Guardian Nigeria News – Nigeria and World News — World — The Guardian Nigeria News – Nigeria and World News” https://guardian.ng/news/the-power-of-one-negash-creating-partnerships-transforming-africa-with-adn/

“The Power of One: Negash is Forging Partnerships, Transforming Africa with ADN | The Guardian Nigeria News – Nigeria and the world news – Business News” https://biz.crast.net/the-power-of-one-negash-is-forging-partnerships-transforming-africa-with-adn-the-guardian-nigeria-news-nigeria-and-the-world-news/

“African Diaspora Investment Symposium 2023 – Press Releases” https://africandiasporanetwork.org/programs/adis23/press-releases/