Eva Kapinga is a social entrepreneur who is passionate about assisting rural women access funding and skills to grow their business and realise sustainability. This idea grew on Eva in 2016 when she attended a Village Community Banking (VICOBA) seminar in 2016. During this seminar she learnt about the Mata Masu Dubara (MMD) project of Niger established by CARE International, a non-profit organization operating in Tanzania.
The MMD project assists rural and peri-urban women to access technical and simple credit facilities. This enables the rural families to initiate income generating activities in a sustainable manner so that they can improve their socio-economic status. While exploring and studying the VICOBA groups Eva found out that the VICOBA groups struggled to expand or form more groups due to a lack of seed funding. She established the Light Trust Fund a non-profit organization to provide the much-needed seed funding. The fund also provides entrepreneurial and business skills training to the women. Most women in Tanzania are poor and had difficulty accessing loans from formal institutions such as banks and micro-finance institutions due to the lack of qualifications, skills and collateral.
Eva self-funded the Trust through her own saving from income she generated from her small busines, getting loans from a friend and funds from her loving husband. These funds enable the VICOBA groups to get seed funding after their training to engage in income generating activities and savings groups.
Many challenges were faced in setting up the Trust fund and one of them was raising funds for rolling out the Trainer of Trainers (TOT) exercises for the VICOBA groups. Eva tried to overcome this challenge by asking some of the willing VICOBA facilitators to offer the trainings on a voluntary basis. Another challenge was the unavailability of transportation needed visit and set up more VICOBA groups. Eva had to use a bicycle to visit some of the groups but accessing groups in the remote places is still difficult. Due to the lack of office equipment such as a computer to entering data from the groups is slow because everything is done manually. Eva continues to collect data on hard copies from VICOBA and tries to transfer them into electronic data.
Despite these challenges the attitude towards women in business is slowly changing in Tanzania because of many business exhibitions show casing women businesses and also because of the growth that the Trust has seen over the years. They have grown from five groups to 185, of which 85% of them are female. The age of the group members varies from 18 to 65 years. As a direct benefit of Light Trust Fund, women are now saving their money in the groups and community banks and they also own assets. More women are also sending their children to schools by borrowing school fees from their groups.
Eva shares a number of factors that have helped her realise such success. These are
- Have self -confidence, persistence and commitment no matter what happens when setting up a business help in making it a success.
- Learn – acquire entrepreneurial skills before starting a business.
- Use your experience – Eva notes how her knowledge in teaching, banking as well as her exposure in facilitating micro enterprise trainings and the in-depth knowledge about the VICOBA groups helped Eva in her managing her business
- Attitude is important – Her attitude towards money also helps her in running the business because she is always keen to invest in other activities such as the entrepreneurial school and this enables her to help other women to set up their own businesses.
Eva wishes to assist more women through the Light Trust fund to set up sustainable. She also wants to set up the LTF entrepreneurship centre and the VICOBA training college to train more women own their own businesses.
Find out more about our Women’s Economic and Social Advancement programme
The Trust supports and mobilises civil society networks on issues of ending child marriage, ending violence against children, ending female genital mutilation and promoting children’s rights, to carry out advocacy and action across Africa. Special focus is placed on Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia where child marriage continues to be a problem largely driven by poverty, gender inequality, harmful traditional practices, conflict, low levels of literacy, limited opportunities for girls and weak or non-existent protective and preventive legal frameworks.
Education is a fundamental right for all children, which is also a vehicle for social, economic and political transformation in communities, countries and the African continent at large. Recent studies indicate a lack of progress in some of the critical commitments aimed at improving education quality, access, retention and achievement, particularly for girls. In most African countries, girls may face barriers to learning, especially when they reach post-primary levels of education. By implementing multi-dimensional approaches to education which includes core education, personal development, life skills and economic competencies, the Trust partners with funding partners, governments, civil societies and the private sector to improve education access.
The Nutrition and Reproductive, Maternal, New-born, Child and Adolescent Health and Nutrition, (RMNCAH+N) of the Children’s Rights and Development Programme aims at promoting the Global Strategy for women, children and adolescents’ health within the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) agenda. The strategy emphasises on the importance of effective country leadership as a common factor across countries making progress in improving the health of women, children and adolescents.
Through its Early Childhood Development (ECD) plan, The Trust will seek to put into action the new science and evidence Report that was presented by Lancet Series on Good and early development – the right of every child. This will be achieved by mobilising like-minded partners to contribute in the new science and evidence to reach all young children with ECD. The Trust’s goal is to be a catalyst for doing things differently, in particular, to rid fragmentation and lack of coordination across ECD sectors. In response to evidence showing the importance of political will in turning the tide against the current poor access and quality of ECD. Even before conception, starting with a mother’s health and social economic conditions, the early years of a child’s life form a fundamental foundation that determines whether a child will survive and thrive optimally.