Impacting lives everyday
Read about women who are believing themselves to change their destiny.
Inspiring other entrepreneurs
Beatrice Bako is an inspirational 31-year-old entrepreneur living in Nyakadoti village located in Kiryandongo district in north-western Uganda along Kampala-Gulu highway. Because of her courage to pursue her dream, Beatrice is one of our top entrepreneurs inspiring others. Beatrice is a member of Siriba Youth Savings Group, and she owns an African-print tailoring business in Bweyale town council.
making great strides
Beatrice started her business shortly after she joined one of the VSLAs LINKAGES is supporting. One of our requirement is that, each member of the saving group must have a saving account with a VSLA to qualify for LINKAGES loan.
Before joining LINKAGES, Beatrice worked as a support worker at a local tailoring workshop, and this is where her journey of entrepreneurship began.
"My plan is to open a bigger workshop where I can train other women" - Beatrice
She said, “For the time I worked at the tailoring workshop I was not earning a salary, but my boss used to give me some little money as an appreciation. My interest was not to get a job there, but I wanted to learn tailoring skills on how to make dresses and shirts and get enough confidence to start my own business. When I raised 400,000 UGX I decided to quit and join LINKAGES program and started with a saving of 4,000 UGX ($1.25).”
Beatrice was determined to start her own business even when she did not have a regular income. She said, “although I started with a saving of 4,000UGX I used to save different amounts money once or twice a week. This helped me increase my savings” Her goal was to raise 400,000UGX ($108) in savings so that she can qualify to apply for LINKAGES loan. By November 2020, Beatrice had raised 400,000 in her savings with the group, and she applied for a loan of 500,000 ($135) as her first loan ever to start a business of her dream.
Beatrice says, while many businesses had closed because of the Covid-19 pandemic, she has been lucky to continue working and because of this, she has been able to pay off 100% of her first loan.
In April 2021 Beatrice took a second loan of 800,000 ($216) as additional capital to boost her business. With a larger loan, she is now working with three girls (students) who are not going to school because of the Covid lockdown. She is training them to learn tailoring as an additional skill before they go back to school. She said, “everything I do in my business is worth the struggle because my earnings have increased from 150,000 to 800,000 per month and I want to make it even bigger. I have enough customers who want me to make for them beautiful dresses and shirts at a good price.”
When we asked her about her figure plans, Beatrice said, “my immediate plan is to buy a manual tailoring machine that I can use to train students because the one we are using now I hire it and it is expensive. I want to buy my own machine so that I can save the money I pay for this machine every month.” On her future plans Beatrice said, “My plan is to open a bigger workshop where I can train other women in my community and create jobs for them. I also plan to go for an advanced training course in tailoring and design so that I can learn new skills and teach many more young women who want to start tailoring business like me.”
Beatrice said, her message to the young people out here is that I encourage them to join saving groups because that’s what I also started with.
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