Why we are capturing data of women entrepreneurs in the North – Ataguba
Ora Naomi Ataguba is the Vice President, African Women Entrepreneurship Programme (AWEP), South West. She is the Project Director, AWEP Nigeria Green Gold Project, (ANGGP), a project geared towards collating data of women entrepreneurs in the North. In this interview, she spoke about the project and the discoveries.
job?
to the local governments. But we have a network in all the local governments. We are not able to put them to action because of financial constraints.
What number have you got so far?
So far, we have captured about 10,000.
How many people do you have doing this
We have the 10 coordinator and then the coordinators have volunteers. Some people have five volunteers while others are all by themselves.
From our initial budget, we need about 400 people and now we are not up to 50 working on the project. But we are talking to more people to buy into this project.
How long is this going to be?
We will submit our final report in July 2017. We will do our best and our best will be to touch different areas that are yet to be touched. We do our best based on the situation we find ourselves. We don’t have five per cent of the budget for the project. But we have adopted this as our corporate social responsibility (CSR). We have become very passionate about what we are doing.
What do the women stand to gain by this project you are doing?
It is common knowledge that without data, it is very hard to intervene in any situation. Even in your home, if you do not know how many people you are feeding, how do you shop? Any country that is properly run has a data it can work with. And we have absolute trust in the US embassy which has awarded us this grant to do this job. The embassy normally doesn’t offer grant for collating data but what they offer is intervention and they told us that at our meeting. So for them to be doing this, that means there is intervention to come. Be it in the area of training, machinery assistance, assistance for women in farming or production. But without data, they cannot help you.
Apart from intervention that can come from the US embassy, many women entrepreneurs are coming into our network . We have women amongst us who are producing an item and are looking on to other women to supply the raw material for the businesses. So amongst us, businesses will thrive.
We are looking for women in the rural areas who are doing XYZ. They also will benefit from us as an organisation. All the leaders of these groups are coming on board, the African Women Entrepreneurship Network and they are coming into a huge network that will help build everybody and make us stronger. And the benefit outweighs all the problems we are facing.
So the grant is from the US embassy, there is no support from Nigerian government?
None from the Nigerian government yet but we are allowed to seek for help and we have started doing that. We have sent letters out for sponsorship. We have some response from Globacom. They said they will come on board but we are yet to receive any support from them yet. But we have had two meetings with them. They say they will come on board the project.
There are plans to go to other parts of the country, but it will depend on how successful we are with this one.