THE COST OF INEQUALITY

By Nyasigo Kornel

Women business owners are critically important to the Tanzanian economy. Tanzania's over 50 per cent of population are women who own businesses that employ 8 million people and contribute 30 per cent to the economy. However, women continue to face unique obstacles in the world of business.

The Tanzania Global Development Learning Center (TGDLC) has conducted a very strong seminar for women entrepreneurs and offers many programs and services to help them succeed. The seminar helped them by providing remedies for the problems regarding women’s entrepreneurship.
Over the past decade, significant research has demonstrated what many have known for a long time: women are critical to economic development, active civil society, and good governance, especially in developing countries.
Focusing on women is often the best way to reduce birth rates and child mortality; improve health, nutrition, and education; stem the spread of HIV/AIDS; build robust and self-sustaining community organizations; and encourage grassroots democracy.
Much like human rights a generation ago, women's rights were long considered too controversial for mainstream policy. For decades, international development agencies skirted gender issues in highly patriarchal societies.

Despite an enabling policy environment for women in Tanzania, women continue to be affected by poverty, lack of access to resources, and gender inequities that exclude them from opportunities to improve their livelihoods and their rights.
Female empowerment is a crucial means towards social and economic development. This is an area however, where women and girls are at particular risk of exclusion from potential opportunities, because of poverty, illiteracy, insufficient access to education and training and insufficient time as a result of their multiple roles in families and communities.
In addition, in many cultures, women are considered less capable of understanding and operating technologies, or of successfully engaging in science, math and technology.
Members of women’s business-related and non-business and local women entrepreneurs received their first advanced training from Tanzania Global Development and Learning Center (TGDLC).
The training, which included classroom activities as well as on-the-job work, seminar provided women with remedies for the problems regarding women’s intreprenuership, siting example form Japan.
It identified the main problems and challenges faced by those target groups of entrepreneurs and contained a number of recommendations to help foster their development.
The seminar identified and evaluated of national measures related to start-ups, information/advice, funding, training, mentoring and networks relative to the promotion of female entrepreneurship. These measures were to be evaluated in order to identify good practices.
There is a hope that if couple of thousands of such empowered women in the country can come together, it shall turn this country into a different set up by utilizing the skill of women entrepreneur and the local expertise of women and even reach the remote corners of the country for minimizing food losses and enhancing employment.
All this crystallizes into a major agenda of network to take science and technology to the villages as a successful venture to prevent food losses on the one side and to knowledge empowerment on the another side.
Given the importance of women to economic and political development, it is no surprise that they are on the front line of modernization efforts around the world. But empowering women is rarely easy: it produces tensions everywhere, because it often collides with the twin powers of culture and religion.
The women who are empowered bring changes to the whole community. As a matter of fact, when we look at this great opportunity it almost involves the training of the trainers and hence regenerate multiple effect. Apart from the framework of a large number of scientists and technologists who have a tremendous opportunity, unlike other women in the rural side, such already achieved empowerment needs to be completely and optimally utilized to catalyze those who are not empowered.


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