Zoomed in on Gicumbi

For the last 3 years, TWB has made tremendous strides toward achieving our milestones. Bakeries have launched throughout the country of Rwanda and the TWB staff has almost tripled. These are signs of success.

In 2018, TWB is focusing on Gicumbi as our next training and bakery launch site. Our preparations are on a good track, including developing the training schedule, partner relationships, and interview process for the participants. We will be launching the training for this group on April 23rd.

Gicumbi is in the northern part of Rwanda. Within this community, TWB will be working with Rwandans, as well as a diverse group of refugees living in the Gihembe Refugee Camp. The location offers a good business opportunity because of the local demans for food products. Additionally, those living within the refugee camp do not have farms to cultivate, so they only rely on the crops that are produced by the local Rwandans.

In terms of bread demand, our market testing has been positive. TWB has found a need for the breads in this district because most of the breads are brought from Kigali.

TWB breads use locally sourced ingredients and are highly nutritious, delicious and affordable. Among children under the age of 5 years, stunting levels were 36.6% in Gicumbi district according to the Demographic Health Survey in 2015. Thus, our breads can be a mechanism to fight against malnutrition and improve families’ nutrition as well as nutrition for the entire community.

Moreover, the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, in coordination with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), recently changed their subsidy program for refugees in Rwanda. They are piloting a cash-subsidy system – meaning that each refugee, rather than being given her allotted rice or corn subsidy, is given the cash equivalent. The hope is that the cash system will spawn micro-economies.

Stay tuned and will be updated for more progress on this new opportunity arising…

This is #breadpower. 

Julie and Aime on a recent site visit to TWB’s upcoming bakery site in Gicumbi, Rwanda. 

Piloting TWB in the Refugee Community

Since I was young, I have been both passionate and curious about the process of adapting cultural experiences into new environments. This doesn’t always necessitate transcontinental travel – sometimes our most profound cross-cultural experiences happen in the migration between neighborhoods, schools, churches and from varying social, familial, food, educational, and work experiences.

TWB’s organization in Rwanda incorporates cross-cultural engagement daily as our team partners with Rwandans to ensure sound production, sales, and growth.

Since October, TWB has worked closely with the African Community Center in Denver as we have begun to expand our programming to the U.S. We are currently piloting a training program with seven refugee women to better understand how our work is both relevant and needed in the context of the U.S.

Per a state-issued report on foreign born residents, 2,199 refugees were resettled in Colorado in 2013, mostly from East Asian countries.[1] Currently, Over 1/6 of Denver’s population is considered either refugee or immigrant. In response to a growing need, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) launched operations in Denver to help provide resettlement and integration services for new individuals to the United States – especially those coming from crisis.

Currently, with ACC, our training has been tailored for refugee-specific participants. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), a refugee is a person, “who has left her country of origin and is unable to or unwilling to return” for a fear of persecution. ACC has focused on this population as international conflict has grown across the world in the past decade and as more refugees have fled to safety in the U.S.

While ACC can aid in the services necessary for community establishment (housing, cultural orientation, school enrollment, etc.), the resettlement agency also looks to partner with other non-governmental organizations to assist with additional employment, education, and resource-based support for new community members.

TWB is enthusiastic and ready to fill this demand for partnership; our hope is that new TWB programming can help in this process, providing additional educational, training and work-readiness opportunities for refugees in Colorado, especially women.

In our pilot program, TWB trains a small women’s group for two hours each week. Recipe reading, budgeting, practical baking skills, nutrition education, and tips for grocery shopping in the U.S. are some topics we included in this pilot program. One of our participants recently noted that her class with TWB has been her “favorite” since taking part in ACC programming. Additionally, we have had the opportunity to introduce participants to our dry bread mix products as a potential future market opportunity for income generation.

Our class has included women from Burma, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Our pilot will end this month, but TWB & ACC will be continuing discussions about an on-going partnership with a larger, broader, and bolder vision of empowering women from an array of cultural backgrounds. If you are interested in learning more about our work in Denver, follow our social media networks. You can contribute to our work by visiting our donation page at www.womensbakery.com/donate.

[1]https://www.denvergov.org/content/dam/denvergov/Portals/643/documents/CommunitySupport/ImmRef_Assessment.pdf

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.