For farmers like Samuel Baale, chairman of Bulongo Farmer Business Group in eastern Uganda, cotton is vital to life. The area’s main cash crop, cotton helps pay for homes, provide food and send children to school. And the market for Samuel’s cotton comes from one major buyer: Mutuma Commercial Agencies…
Even in the poorest of countries, business opportunities exist. People have demand for goods and services, and they have the potential to supply them. All too often, though, markets in these countries fail.
The 54-member farming cooperative began working with TechnoServe in August 2010 to improve their business skills and diversify into a new market opportunity: purple passion fruit. With TechnoServe’s assistance, Tiret Self-Help Group built a passion fruit nursery and sowed the first seeds in December 2010. As the first vines begin…
In Nicaragua, Iveth Juárez, a small business owner who processes and sells cereal to the local market, had attended seminars, workshops, courses and training sessions on accounting and finance. But at the end of each session, she always felt the same sense of confusion.
For more than 30 years, Specioza Kakweezi has grown the plantain-like banana known as matooke on her one-acre farm in the hills of southwestern Uganda. Specioza, a widow, once grew matooke simply to feed her family. Today, she has turned her farm into a profitable business – and a…
When setting out to design a basic finance course that could be useful across the myriad programs TechnoServe executes, we decided to try something a little different than the traditional workshop model.
