Bread Knowledge

As I reflect on my last three years helping to build The Women’s Bakery operations in Rwanda, I have been thinking about the knowledge I have gained and the lessons I have learned.

I know that this knowledge will only be useful to the business if I can successfully transfer it to my colleagues As a result, I have begun to focus on training. My days are now filled with one-hour blocks to teach a variety of topics such as: how to process employee income and social security taxes, how to build pivot tables in excel, how to create a company policy, how to create employee contracts, and how to purchase and enroll employees in health insurance. I have always thought of myself as a horrible teacher. So, this process is teaching me yet another lesson – how to become a better teacher.

We have to acknowledge that a single task that may take us one hour might take five hours of training and countless follow-up questions before someone else may be able to master it. When we budget our time, we often fail to budget the appropriate amount of time it takes to actually train and pass off a single task. But, we have to. We have to invest in training our team members, especially in times of transition to ensure that operations can continue smoothly.

I am excited to pass on the knowledge I have of our operations to my colleagues and I am excited for the business growth that will follow.

I am confident that my colleagues will take what we have built and the lessons we have learned to build better systems and make more sound decisions that will make the business grow bigger and stronger than we ever could have imagined when we started.

This is bread knowledge; this is #breadpower.

From Pottery to Bakery

This month, TWB, together with AsOne, started a bakery training in Kagina, Kamonyi district in the South of Rwanda. The group is composed of 5 women all living in the same neighborhood.

This week, our trainer on the site took some time to sit with one of the trainees, Hadidja Esperance, and hear from her what it feels like to be in this training.

Hadidja, together with other women in this group, used to gain their living through pottery. Life was hard for her and her family to meet their basic needs, but now that she has joined this training she hopes that her life is going to change.

She said, “You can’t feel how I feel to be doing baking as a business, I used to do pottery but with no gains, but now I’m baking and eating nutritious breads; it’s so great.”

She continued by explaining that she used make so many vases and then wait for a long time for people to come and buy them, but now she is happy that she will make breads that are needed in the community and people will eat them right after being baked.  

“My children will eat breads and improve their health, I will make money out of breads and my whole community will benefit… but when I was doing pottery, it was just survival, not living,” she continued.

The story of Hadidja is very much in common with most of the women TWB is working with. Many of them used to be street vendors and worked for daily surviving with no hope for tomorrow. They never used to make savings for future needs like health insurance or children’s school fees. For TWB, as a social enterprise, we feel that those people are most in need of our program and we have seen a great impact over the last two years.

We believe that one can advance from street vending to supermarket supplier and storefront management.  And as Hadidja says, one can come from pottery to bakery.

#Breadislifechanging

Historical note: Potters in Rwanda tend to be among the poorest and most vulnerable—most potters belong to the Twa tribe, which makes up less than 1% of the Rwandan population and which has historically been marginalized. The craft of pottery, while highly respected in many western societies, does not necessarily hold the same esteem in Rwanda.

Let’s invest in education for a bright future!

Education is the most powerful weapon that you can use to change the world.

The Women’s Bakery uses education as a tool to empower women and to help them to become active citizens in the community.

Through our training program, women get knowledge on how to start successful businesses, mostly by focusing on a bakeries. We have trained different women’s groups throughout Rwanda, including Rutsiro, Nyagatare, Remera and Gasabo.

One of the groups is called Togetherness Cooperative, and they are soon launching their bakery in Ndera Sector, about 30 minutes east of Kigali. Donathile, one of the trainees, said that she considers this training as a lifetime opportunity, and she believes this will help her to change her life status from being temporarily employed to a person with permanent employment.

She says“if you educate a woman it means you educate a whole community.” This week, TWB is demonstrating just that through Jeanne D’Arc, a graduate from the first TWB training group in Rwanda.

Jeanne D’Arc is now facilitating TWB in baking sessions and in marketing breads in the neighborhood community with the current Ndera trainee group. Though the bakery in Ndera has yet to open, many people are already coming to buy and taste the breads. Jeanne D’Arc is helping trainees to improve their sales pitches and boost-up their confidence in selling.  

This is a great achievement we have in TWB, we don’t have to look for someone outside of our network to teach these skills- women already trained are the ones who are teaching others.

Together we can go very far. We believe in women’s potential. Women can change the world. 

Together, women and men, we rise.

There are two questions I am always asked when I share that I work with The Women’s Bakery. Whether I am asked by friends, baristas, cyclists, strangers, or frankly, anyone who has ears to listen, these two questions remain constant.

“Where is your bakery?” and, “do you help only women?”

Quickly, I explain that TWB is a social enterprise with most of our work located in East Africa – including the bakeries that we help launch and oversee. This is usually followed by enthusiastic requests to have a bakery in the heart of Denver or another U.S. city. I smile and nod. “Someday, guys. Someday.”

When it comes to the question of gender, I emphasize that our work cannot, and should not be done in isolation. We are aptly named The Women’s Bakery with women as a focus because of the particular challenges women face globally, but we simultaneously believe that any investment in human development must involve everyone.

This year, we will have two trainings that include male participants. That’s a big deal. Working with men matters because promoting larger-level concepts of autonomy, or choice, or opportunity, has to be supported by the society-at-large.

Traditionally decision-making, authority, and control have often been yielded to men. As women enter the workforce, complete education, and make choices about the direction of their lives, power becomes more equitable. Men – and women- work together for the communities, families, and children they are looking to support. Equitable societies give voice to all – no matter what gender one has.

In the United States, when women were provided the right to vote in 1920, the process of acceptance and advocacy for civic equality was a movement propelled by both genders. Securing this victory didn’t happen overnight; it developed over time, with investment from all genders as a mutually beneficial change for our country.  

In baking bread, learning about nutritious food options, and building a locally-relevant bakery, men are needed because men are also part of the community.

When women and men are able to work side by side in a bakery, equality begins to take shape. Women – and men- are equally capable in kneading dough, in marketing products, and in tracking inventory. Identifying areas of gender inequity and previous assumptions based on gender, TWB actively is seeking to empower women – which in turn, empowers us all.  

Yvonne's Dreams

Even though I have chosen my course of study, I still often feel like I’m looking for that special purpose in life. Am I trying too hard? When I started thinking about the approach I wanted to use to figure out what I want out of life, it made so much sense. I needed to find an organization to work for that was doing something I am passionate about.

Now, I am very happy because I am working with TWB to enable women entrepreneurs to strengthen their ability to be independent in terms of finance and health.

My dream has always been about contributing to the economy of my country by working from the bottom up. In the three months I have spent working with TWB I have learned how to bake different breads, vanilla cake, chocolate cake, chapatti and sambusa. I am learning a lot about how to prepare and to bake delicious and healthful bread and cakes. In addition to baking I have already learned a lot about administration, working in a team, and finance, and I think that in the coming months I will learn even more!

Thanks to Julie, Meg and Aime, and all of the women at The Women’s Bakery!

bread is for everyone.

The most beautiful thing about bread (the delicious taste withstanding) is that it belongs to no one. Instead, it belongs to everyone.

Bread (English), brot (German), bröd (Swedish), pan (Spanish), mkate (Swahili), or imigati (Kinyarwanda), is a staple food in nearly every culture, region, and country in the world.

Last week, while in a training session at African Community Center, a woman from Burma described the way that she would make bread at home,

“…we make ours flat, mostly with wheat flour, and with more sugar.”

Other women in the room nodded; some commented on the way they would consume the product. As for me, I spoke about some of the ingredients we use in our bread recipes – the ones that we teach in Rwanda and in Tanzania. The women at ACC wrote vigorously in their notebooks as I explained the importance of yeast and the importance of kneading. Bread isn’t altogether difficult; but it is both a science and an art, and so the process is certainly important.

After introducing the work of The Women’s Bakery to this group of 8 women, they shared their own names and places of origin. Women from Burma, Somalia, Congo, and yes – even Rwanda – gathered for “tea time”, where women at ACC are able to learn something new, or discuss things they are encountering with new life in the United States.

ACC is an organization that helps refugees rebuild lives in Denver. According to the American Immigration Council, 1 in 10 Coloradans is an immigrant, meaning approximately 500,634 individual lives have a history somewhere else. That’s powerful.

At the request of ACC, our Denver team taught one of our personal growth and development lessons, Thinking and Learning Styles. The lesson is typically taught within our programs in Rwanda, but the idea that it can be applicable and relevant stateside is an encouraging notion for our team. Our model is relevant to women – globally – and that is an exciting consideration for our growth as an organization in the future. Indeed, bread (and education and empowerment) is for everyone.