Growing up in a part of the country where successful women were the exception rather than the norm, Everlyne Moraa Oyagi refused to sit around and watch fellow female peers fall victim to a lack of parental support and other cultural hindrances like early marriages and pregnancies. As narrated this is the story of one daring woman who decided to be the change she wanted to see.
Miritini, a county assembly ward in Jomvu constituency, Mombasa County, isn’t renowned as a haven for girls with dreams. In the eyes of the community, girls grow up to marry and bear children, rendering girls’ education a seemingly fruitless pursuit. Fortunately for Everlyne Moraa Oyagi, her parents were cut from a different cloth as they strongly impressed upon their daughters the value of education. Against this backdrop, she grew up undeterred by cultural practices and was able to pursue her education and live her dreams.
“As a child, I imagined many things. What if the community advocated for women role models so that more girls could aim for higher goals and not just grow up to get married? What if there were relatable personalities within the community to remind them that their dreams were valid? This thinking has remained with me all these years,” says Everlyne.
As a student at Mama Ngina Girls High School in Mombasa, she fondly recalls how their school principal would invite the alumni to share their experiences with the students to encourage and challenge them to dream big. Everlyne noted everything the alumni told them in a treasured notebook, which she still keeps. She would add notes on what she hoped to do for her community when she completed school.
These notes stoked in Everlyne a relentless fire to champion gender equality and equity so that women and girls would have a chance to get heard and the opportunity to pursue their dreams, careers, passions, and ambitions.
Years later, the 31-year-old realised her lifelong dream when she founded her company, Swazuri Events, an events management firm that empowers the girlchild and inspires the youth through different events.
In 2023, Tuinuane, a socioeconomic empowerment program by Swazuri Events, brought together 270 young women entrepreneurs in Jomvu, Changamwe, and Mvita constituencies for training. This program exposed some existing gaps that needed to be filled.
“Tuinuane, a program funded by USAID Kenya, Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI), and Kenyatta University, trained female entrepreneurs in four crucial areas in business management: access to capital, access to markets, design thinking, and digital skills for business. During the training and mentorship sessions, the questions and needs from the young women who were so hungry to succeed in their businesses made me realise that there was more we could do after the program,” she explains what motivated her to start her community-based organisation (CBO).
Swazuri Events set up Kuza Youth CBO with the objective of helping more young women entrepreneurs in the communities around Miritini and Jomvu constituencies in Mombasa County.
Kuza’s mission includes capacity building for young women in business through training, mentorship, and community development. According to Everlyne, this is critical for impact because she believes that knowledge is power, even when it comes to businesses. Their vision is to be a leading organisation in Africa for nurturing young female entrepreneurs to build sustainable businesses.
Everlyne believes that the mission and vision of the organisation will help impact women in the community by making them understand the fundamentals of building a business. This will reduce failure rates and empower young women to have businesses that support them and their families comfortably and possibly outlive their generation.
“Nine out of ten women running small businesses say finance is the main challenge. Our organisation tries to understand individual business operations, including bookkeeping, and once we get that right, we have financial partners who support Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) with access to affordable credit as long as they are registered businesses with bank or MPESA accounts,” explains Everlyne.
Kuza measures the success of their programs with the improvement of the lives of the women they assist and their families. They carry out continuous monitoring and evaluation of the businesses they support.
“Since our key focus areas are access to capital and markets and digital footprint, we continuously seek to offer these linkages for our trained entrepreneurs and evaluate the results. For example, how many take up the opportunity to access affordable credit through our partners? How many register their businesses to allow them to open business accounts? How many keep proper records through bookkeeping? How many understand their basic financial needs, which they can use to borrow loans to finance their businesses? Are businesses growing, and where there are challenges, how can we offer mentorship?” explains Everlyne.
Kuza uses the International Labour Organisation (ILO) training packages with a focus on the IMPROVE YOUR BUSINESS program. They develop programs that introduce already practising entrepreneurs to good principles of business management. Their programs are designed on a need basis using the design thinking approach, where they have the business owners tell them their challenges and then develop a program to cater to those needs.
“I envision Kuza Youth growing into a CBO that supports young women’s dreams by helping them access global markets in whatever their passion or ambition leads them to. Kuza will help them build their credit score to allow them to tap into bigger financial support that will see them scale their offerings to the market. What you can expect soon from Kuza Youth are stories that empower this and the next generation, especially for women living in marginalised communities,” she concludes by explaining her dream for the organisation.
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