Women-owned businesses pop up all over Addis Ababa, and the days where women stayed in the house and depended on their husband seem to be passing, writes Emilie Maarbjerg Mørk.
It is not hard to find businesses in Addis Ababa that are led by women. Go for example to the S“k”andinavian Bakery in Bole, where you will be met by the delicious smell of freshly baked cinnamon rolls and other Nordic pastry, that Ethiopia Belay Gizaw brought to this African capital almost five years ago.
“I have always dreamt of being self-employed, and after I had lived in Sweden for more than 13 years, I decided to come back to my home country, and I took the chance with the bakery. I had always liked to bake, and I wanted to bring something from Scandinavia to Ethiopia that was new here,” she says.
It was hard work setting up a business in a city that was no longer familiar to her, but Ethiopians are hard-working people as she says, and gradually she turned the local residents to like the taste of more healthy Nordic bread and pastry.
“I think more women should start businesses because it does not have to be a big investment. Everyone has the ingredients for simple products like Sambusas, but if you start selling them, you can earn money quickly,” Ethiopia Belay Gizaw point out.
She has opened up a café and a second shop since the beginning and now have employees to be cashiers, so she can focus of coordinating and managing. When asked about the future, she is very positive and keen on continuously expanding.
Traditions are changing
Traditionally women have not owned property and businesses in Ethiopia, but that seems to be changing rapidly these years. Wolday Amha (PhD), the executive director in the Association of Ethiopian Micro-Finance Institutions, which have 35 members amongst the Ethiopian micro-finance institutions, says that women are increasingly taking interest in being self-employed, but that this also has to do with the many initiatives to pull women into business-ownership.
“The women are proving to be very good business-owners. They are hard workers and they manage the money well. Within microfinance, this have given women priority with our membership institutions, but Ethiopia should also try to make more women start bigger businesses,” he says.
Special incitements like favorable loans for women are being made, and that makes it possible for risk-willing women to get a really good starting-point. Earlier, starting your own business was not encouraged from the learning institution and all the best students would get jobs as bureaucrats, but the association made a survey in 2014 that shows that a very big percentage of entrepreneurs are now opportunity-driven when they set up a business.
Hanny Abebe is a bachelor in Law who started importing cars to Ethiopia with her husband five years ago, because she saw the opportunity of a well-running business. She sees bigger opportunities however, and for her the loans can be a way of starting a larger scale business.
“I am planning on completing my master in Law next year, because then I can start a firm to advise international companies on Ethiopian law. Being a woman I can show my current business license and get a good loan from the bank,” she says.
She is willing to take the risk, because she sees an ever-growing demand for new services and products in Ethiopia.
“We have so many unexplored fields of business here. If you go to Europe for example it is much harder to come up with a business idea that someone else have not already exploited. Here, we lack a lot of material products, and the large population constitutes an ever growing demand, so there are lots of opportunities of success,” she says.
Lack of training is a barrier
According to Wolday, the biggest disadvantage of the women is, that they usually lack skills to manage businesses and that many of them do not perceive themselves as capable of starting businesses.
“It is very important for the sustainability of our economic growth, that the women are educated to manage these things. It is much better today with many women starting with good university-educations, but we still need to get to those, who aren’t as fortunate,” he says.
There are organizations that provide training for women who want to start their own businesses, and the government has opened offices that advise women on where to locate their business and how much money to start with as well, so already the path towards self-employment is made easier. However, reaching the rural areas still constitutes a problem, and the growth is therefore mostly centered around Addis Ababa.
A good future ahead
Kelly Seifu Yohannes, who is an internationally founded Ethiopian businesswoman, and owns the eco-friendly luxury resort ‘Kelly’s Retreat’ in Adama, see a bright future for female entrepreneurship. She finds Ethiopian women more than capable of running their own businesses, and she underlines, that the law-wise very gender-equal Ethiopian society makes it easy for women to start up on their own.
“The Ethiopian law does not put up obstacles for women who want to start on their own, and that is very positive. I used to be a part advocating for women’s rights to have the same positions for men worldwide, but the change has really been made, so the possibilities are much better now”.
She is about the perfect picture of a female entrepreneur who has taken all her skills and knowledge and made a successful life of it. Her retreat opened in 2010 and being a fresh and unique offer it was soon the object of attention.
“Ethiopia is such a good land to do business in. We live in a country with nature resembling a paradise, with nice welcoming people and with the economic possibilities for entrepreneurship. Now is the time,” Kelly Seifu Yohannes says.
[www.thereporterethiopia.com]