Supporting Her Business, Around the Globe

A woman stands in front of a couple rows of pupils. The room is dimly lit with natural light, and has brick walls and a dirt floor. This training is taking place in Zambia.

Back in 2024, iDE excitedly welcomed Support Her Enterprise — aka SHE — into the fold. SHE is a Cambodian organization that specializes in providing business training to female entrepreneurs.

Women in Cambodia struggle to access and benefit from business training. There aren’t many networks to connect them, and business training isn’t tailored to their context as a woman. SHE training helps female entrepreneurs increase their financial literacy, grow their businesses, and improve their earning opportunities.

The SHE training program has had great success in Cambodia, and now, joining forces with iDE, they have the opportunity to expand to other countries. But to do so, they first needed to adapt their curriculum. Because just like the context for women entrepreneurs is unique, so is the context for each country.

Thanks to the support of the Manitoba Council for International Cooperation (MCIC) and the Paul Polak Innovation Fund, the SHE and iDE teams were able to adapt the business training curriculum for use in Zambia, Ethiopia, Ghana, and Mozambique.

One of iDE’s core values is to do things with people, not for people. Together with the people and partners that benefit from the training, the team researched and talked through how to adapt the curriculum. 

For example, adapting the curriculum looked like using case studies about corn farming instead of chicken farming for groups that primarily raise corn. Changing the type of farming made the training easier to understand, and helped women learn and retain more. Other changes included considering reading levels of the participants, how long and frequent training sessions were, and where and how they took place (in-person or virtually).

Thanks to the support of MCIC, SHE trained 28 new facilitators to deliver business training. Sherifatu Mustapha, a newly trained facilitator from Ghana found the skills she learned “extremely empowering.” She is excited to continue empowering the women entrepreneurs she works with through this training. These facilitators have gone on to train 116 women entrepreneurs.

And now these newly trained entrepreneurs can build their businesses and invest back into their families and neighbours — powering real and lasting change in their rural communities.

That’s something to be excited about! And that’s what you make possible through your support of iDE!

You can learn more about each country’s experience by checking out their LinkedIn posts: Mozambique (and another one), Ethiopia, and Ghana.