The Road Less Traveled

Written by TWB's Development Intern, Nichole Crust. 

I love women, baking, and entrepreneurship so when I was looking for an internship and found out about The Women’s Bakery (TWB) the organization seemed like a natural fit. I dug a bit deeper into their founders and model and was honestly skeptical. I wondered what a few white girls without business and baking experience could possibly have to teach Rwanda about health and economic development let alone baking?

The answer surprised me.

I’m so excited to be interning for The Women’s Bakery this summer. My internship started with a two-week trip to Rwanda. I landed in Kigali early on Monday and hit the ground running. Noel, the Country Director graciously picked me up from airport and whisked me away to TWB’s headquarters to meet the Rwanda team and learn more about TWB’s work by attending the team’s weekly meeting.

From my first interactions with the team, their drive and determination to intentionally and holistically impact the lives of women and their families was obvious. My first encounter was a conversation about fire wood and oven temperatures. The group was passionately discussing the best solutions to address problems with oven temperatures, costs of fire wood, lack of fire wood, and alternative fuel sources for their ovens. It seemed like a trivial issue, but it was complex and complicated.

TWB’s administration (which is the most positive and proactive administration I have encountered) approached the task of finding a solution with a holistic approach that not only considered the bottom line for TWB’s budget, but also considered the overall health and well-being of the bakery staff. It was beautiful to witness this team so naturally and intentionally solve this problem in a way the considered the greater good.

I saw this style of administration and problem solving played out again and again as a I visited each of the TWB’s bakeries. At TWB’s Kagina bakery I was struck by the forthcoming way an internal conflict was approached. A new employee who was also new to the city and a new job as a baker in a new organization was navigating the social relationships with other women bakers.

Instead of the issue being ignored, it was acknowledged and a conversation that lead led to a real understanding of each other was facilitated. Understanding the important role of food in problem solving, the women were treated to “tea” to continue to resolve the issue.

The work of TWB is not easy and its approach is on the road less traveled. However, TWB’s methods are effective and working to create systemic sustainable impact in the lives of its employees and their families.

Why Giving Matters: An Inside Look at TWB's Approach

At The Women’s Bakery, we view our supporters as not just believers of our work in Rwanda, but as investors in our model. By being both believers and investors, donors can expect transparency – about where we have been, and where we are going.

During 2017, our team pushed hard to launch two of our new bakeries: Ndera and Kagina. These launches brought our network of bakeries to four within Rwanda. As we have monitored, tested, and learned from these business enterprises, we have realized that our original model of women-owned bakeries isn’t working the way we thought it would. And, because of this, we are responding.

In 2018, we are pivoting to an TWB-ownership model. We will acquire and own the existing bakeries in Rwanda to install TWB-trained managers for an unbounded period of time and provide the women what they’re asking for: jobs and job security. Our TWB managers will follow production and sales goals set by our senior management team to achieve profitability. We will set a runway for the success of these bakeries, and, frankly, to do this, we will need a lot of oversight, work, grit, and vision.

Getting a bakery to profitability requires investment.

Getting multiple bakeries to profitability calls for even more investment.

We can do it – we know it. Our goal for 2018 is to enhance everything that we are doing:

We will continue to ensure that TWB women have jobs and have the opportunity to quadruple their incomes.

We will continue to provide extremely affordable and highly nutritious products to the Rwandan communities our bakeries serve.  

And, with YOUR support, we will continue to work to make sure that these bakery businesses are optimized and thus, sustainable for future operations.

If you are inspired and would like to support our work, you can join us in our Crowdrise Campaign that is eligible for matching funds from Newman’s Own Foundation. Every gift matters and makes a difference. That’s breadpower.

Everyone Is A Teacher

It is always interesting to me, I think, how places are full of senses that are undeniably familiar and unchanging. Rwanda, for example, consistently smells and feels the same to me; the scent of burning wood and the heaviness of the air under the sun conjure memories, experiences, and the strange familiarity I have with Rwanda.

Last month, I exited a plane that ventured all the way from Amsterdam to Kigali, along with TWB’s Co-Founder & COO, Julie Greene. I’ve known Julie a long time – back to our Peace Corps Rwanda days – and so it was nice to return to this country by her side. We managed to get our bags (most of them) and head back to our East Africa team’s home in Kigali. I recognized these smells, feelings, and the day-to-day life of Rwanda right away; it’s good to be back, I thought (albeit very tiredly).

I couldn’t wait to get in our bakeries and see the work that has evolved within our business in Rwanda.

I last spent time in Rwanda with The Women’s Bakery in the fall of 2015.

Back then, we were just launching our first formal Rwanda-based training with a group of 15 women. Since our initial start-up days, TWB has launched a small bakery in the city with this group, along with the numerous other projects we have started around the country – just to the East, in Ndera, and also out in the Western part of the country, in a community called Bumba. TWB has grown and scaled, and it’s been an indescribable opportunity to be a part of.

Most of this growth, however, has happened while I have been working on TWB stateside. While I have been sharing about our work, managing communications and awareness efforts, and working to launch our pilot programming in Denver, TWB has become a well-known organization in Rwanda. And, our Remera, Kigali bakery has also become recognized in the neighborhood community, known for our “good bread” and “friendly service,” per some of our regular customer base, of whom I have had the fortunate chance to talk with. Being back in Rwanda, and with our team, has built a quick and mighty respect for what we, and for what the women in our program, have built.

I’m in awe of the tenacity and commitment that this kind of work requires. Small business development is hard anywhere, but the women we work with are making it happen.

Most profoundly, on a recent morning of baking, I felt an immense wave of gratitude as Liziki, a long-time baker with us, taught me how to properly master our Tresse, Croissant, and Sandwich shapes for our yeast bread product line. Sure, I know how to bake carrot or beet bread like the back of my hand, but these are new innovations in our product line that I previously did not know how to bake. Like a student willing to learn anything, I asked questions and shaped the dough repetitively so I could, with time, acquire this technical skill. I love learning from our bakers in Kigali; it reminds me that we are all teachers, just as we are all learners.

The women in our Kigali Bakery (Remera) have an incredible work-flow and understanding of the ins-and-outs of making a bakery work. Always, there are improvements to make, but what I appreciate most, thus far on this visit, is realizing that when you trust knowledge to have the power it can hold, often, it works.

Education is powerful. Empowerment is when this kind of education has an application, purpose, and leverage for opportunity.

I will be with our Rwanda team for the next month and I’m genuinely, authentically jazzed to learn more. Really, that’s what it is all about. Bread power.

Rwanda: A Land of a Thousand Women

“Hey girl, what is your most unforgettable experience in Rwanda?”

Heather, one of the girls I met with The Women’s Bakery, asked me while we were having a campfire talk in a remote village in the Western Province of Rwanda. After spending 10 days in the East African country, that continues to recover from the traumatizing genocide in 1994, I realized that most of the memorable moments I had were somewhat attached to WOMEN.

I met most of the women during my work at The Women’s Bakery (TWB) through SEID (Sloan Entrepreneurs for International Development).

TWB is a social enterprise that is dedicated to empowering local women by teaching them baking and business skills. The women I met here are quite different, in terms of both educational and cultural backgrounds, yet they are somehow alike: independent, hardworking and elegant, providing me an unique and interesting perspective to learn about this country.

The “Ni BYO" woman - Jean

Jean (the lady in the pink dress) was one of the 9 women currently working at the bakery located in Remera, Kigali TWB’s first bakery in Rwanda.

Every time she saw me, she would say ”Ni BYO”(meaning "It’s true" in Kinyarwanda) to me cheerfully. Yes, the language barriers exist, but her passion and laughs made me feel at home.

Like the other women working in this bakery, she alternates her work at the bakery between morning and afternoon shifts. The morning shift involves the beginning of preparation for fresh batches of breads. The afternoon session also involves baking, in addition to taking the breads out into the community for sales.  

Marketing and selling the product can be challenging for some of the women, because they tend to be shy when introducing and pitching the bread to new customers. But Jean seems to be an exception; her firm eye contact, engaging hand gestures and childish smile make her such a sales genius. In fact, she has even become a teacher to new students engaged in the TWB program outside Kigali.

However,  Jean was not always so outgoing, “At the beginning of the training, she was rather shy and did not speak much. After completing the training for 150 hours, she gradually became confident and felt more empowered,” shared Meg, one of the TWB staff.  Jean herself proclaimed, “I want to work harder, earn more money and pay for my child’s education!”

In these conversations, I began to understand what empowerment really means for these women. It is not simply a result, it's a process that requires time and effort. But the impact is huge and sustainable: Once a stay-at-home mom who could not write nor read, Jean was sometimes ignored or disregarded. But now, she is becoming more optimistic towards life and empowered, financially and mentally. I believe this empowerment is transferrable. And that is what TWB is committed to, and what I came to Rwanda for: to help them replicate the bakery and its impact throughout Rwanda and other countries in Africa.

 The Superwoman - Yvonne

Yvonne is the Operations Manager of the Remera Bakery in Kigali. She joined TWB while studying finance at the University of Kigali.

She is beautiful, amiable, detail-oriented and extremely hardworking. I can tell that she is a woman with lots of stories, and I am glad that I could hear some of them before I left Rwanda.

For her, her role as Operations Manager is not only about getting things done in the bakery business, but also about managing people- resolving interpersonal conflicts and providing constant advice for women both at work and at home.

Women at TWB have learnt a lot from Yvonne, including inventory recording, financial management, goal setting, and life management. At the same time, Yvonne is also drawing some valuable lessons from the hands-on experiences at TWB. “One important thing that I learned at TWB is the meaning of leadership, it’s not school stuff, it’s more about showing carefulness, bringing communication and building trust within people.”

She seems to be more talkative when sharing with me her working experience, “ Also, I learnt the importance of being responsible for myself and my family,” she continued, “I know many women here at the bakery are now pregnant and have multiple children at home, but they don’t have husbands and thus have to carry on all the burdens, and that's too much for them.”

Thanks to the power of education, young generations of women like Yvonne are now becoming more self-aware, independent and ambitious. They might not have access to advanced technology and fancy books like people do in developed countries, but they are forward thinking and open to new concepts and ideas. They represent the growth of this country, and most importantly, the future.

The adventurous women - Heather, Julie & Meg

Heather, Julie and Meg are three American girls currently working at TWB.

Their hospitality, openness and inclusiveness made me feel at home during my stay in Kigali.

Heather and Julie both served in the Peace Corps in Rwanda for just over 2 years. Meg also has experience in the East Africa region, working in Uganda before joining TWB.

For them, living and working in Kigali is an adventurous and eye-opening experience, but also a tough one. Working for a young organization in a sensitive environment means there are frequent challenges. From visiting local institutions to resolve restriction issues, explaining the concept of healthy food to local customers, negotiating with bakery owners and fighting fiercely for women's rights, none of these tasks are easy to resolve. Yet they believe in the power of economic empowerment and education and so they are trying hard to drive changes day by day, step by step.

During my visit, I realized many other women like them come from all over the world and are determined to stay and work in Rwanda, rather than enjoy the more comfortable life in their own countries. Together they are creating values; they are making this country a better place. I admired their courage, faith and power.

Rwanda, a land of a thousand hills, a land of a thousand women.

Women in this country are different, in an array of aspects. But they are in many ways alike. I could feel this country’s history and the present embedded in them.

And from them, I could see the future of this country.

Piloting TWB in the United States

In January, The Women’s Bakery will celebrate our 2nd birthday in East Africa. As we say in Kinyarwanda, Isabukuru Nziza.

In this time, we have been kneading, shaping, and sharing bread with women, men, and communities, both urban and rural alike. From noisy, cramped shops in Kigali to the rolling, lush green hills of the Western Province, our team has traversed the country to leverage the simplicity and affinity of bread (“imigati” in Kinyarwanda) for autonomy and opportunity through small business creation. Bread is brilliant; it requires few ingredients and it is a product forever in demand. Plus, who doesn’t love bread?

Around the world, eating and sharing bread is a communal process, often symbolizing peace. In Rwanda, for example, it’s not uncommon to cook a traditional Rwandan dish, ubugari, or cassava bread, and have three, four, five, or six people pulling pieces from the bread at once. There is truly something soulful about eating meals like this – together.

TWB has come a long way, too. We started baking bread in Rwanda in 2012, in small villages out in the Eastern part of the country. Then, it was just an idea.

Today, it’s a reality.

And here’s the really crazy part: our bakeries are relevant not just in Rwanda. TWB bakeries can (and will) be relevant around the world. Our model – investing in education, women, and business incubation – works because skill development (with a viable product) can act as a catalyst for income generation, empowerment, and education anywhere.  

Since the beginning of our journey, it has been the goal of both Markey and Julie, our co-founders, to adapt this model as a relevant option for women outside of Rwanda. Our focus remains – and will continue to be – on Rwanda and East Africa, but we have been mindful of potential entry points elsewhere to provide opportunity – for everyone.

In November, after months of planning and discussion, we launched a pilot program, We Baked This, with African Community Center in Denver. With the goal of future partnership for testing a US-adapted training program, TWB was hired to conduct a 10-week training program for a small group of refugee women from countries including Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. This group has already learned how to make healthy food choices in American grocery stores, how to read a bread recipe, and how to bake our delicious sweet potato bread.

We will conclude this pilot program in January with the hopes of continuing a partnership with ACC. This way, our model will be available and pertinent to women’s groups in the United States. We are exploring product variation, like bread mixes, to see if there is a viable market for micro-enterprise and vocational education.

Projects like this give me hope, enthusiasm, and zest for The Women’s Bakery. They give me hope because working on behalf of women – whether in Rwanda or the United States – has been a dream of mine since I was young. And, more than just advocating for women’s opportunity, The Women’s Bakery delivers.

It’s not just us, either. It’s the women we work with, the Rwandans that help mobilize and deliver our model, and the supporters we have all over the world. Making bread relevant for all requires the investment of all, too. We’re all needed. And we’re glad you are with us.

May this holiday season (and 2017!) remind you of the possibility and potency that bread and empowerment have anywhere. May you reflect and know that you can be a part of this, believing that a simple slice of bread has the power to change the world.