Kenya SBDC’s Impact in Kiambu County

In Kiambu County, Nairobi, Dr. Teresia Njora witnessed the harsh realities faced by youth and women’s struggles that often lead to social ills such as prostitution, drug abuse, and crime. Determined to make a difference, Dr. Njora founded Baraka Mtindo Fashion Accessories, an enterprise aimed at transforming the lives of these women and youth. This business, supported by Kiambu’s Kenya Small Business Development Center (Kiambu SBDC), not only provides employment opportunities but also equips individuals with essential skills to start their enterprises.

Baraka Mtindo Fashion Accessories’ journey started a few years ago when Dr. Teresia Njora realized that the young women and youth were getting into these criminal activities due to a lack of guidance and a non-favorable economic landscape in the country. “I was heavily touched by the situation in Kiambu and decided to help our people. There was no time to waste. So, I sat down one day and came up with a concept that I thought was going to do miracles.”  says, Dr. Teresia Njora.

Together with a group of other like-minded individuals, they started a rehabilitation center. Realizing that recovery alone was insufficient, Dr.Njora started the vocational training initiative to equip individuals with fashion design and other related skills. After living in the rehabilitation centre and going through the training offered there, they would use these skills to earn a living.

Baraka Mtindo faced several hurdles in acquiring training equipment and accessing viable markets for their products. This changed when they started receiving support from Kiambu SBDC. “The first challenge was getting the equipment for the training and the business. We also had challenges with getting the right markets for our products. The SBDC has supported us in attending several forums and events where we have been selling our products.” shares Dr. Njora.

Part of the recent activities that Dr. Teresia’s initiative has participated in courtesy of Kenya SBDC is this year’s International Women’s Day. Together with her team, they had an opportunity to sell and showcase their fashion products to thousands of people including President Ruto who graced the event.

Recognizing that most of the trainees are women, Kiambu SBDC focused on working closely with Dr. Teresia’s initiative on gender-related activities. This has resulted to tremendous changes

“Since we met Kenya SBDC, Baraka Women has made tremendous progress due to their advisory on how to find markets.” Kiambu SDBC has been offering training and advisory services to the business with the plan of ensuring that it has achieved growth by offering training on proper internal processes like book-keeping, leveraging e-commerce and social media for markets and different ways of accessing finance.

With SBDC’s assistance, Baraka Mtindo is quickly flourishing. The enterprise has expanded its reach and impact, allowing more women and youth to learn and thrive. Already, two additional shops have been started in different towns. More women and youth are being saved from drug abuse and addiction. Baraka Mtindo’s success symbolizes the broader change that Kenya SBDC is achieving in its six operational counties: Kisumu, Kiambu, Makueni, Nakuru, Isiolo, and Mombasa. By taking the best practices from the U.S. Small Business Development Center model and transferring them to a local network of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises, Kenya SBDC is making huge impacts on the lives and livelihoods of people.

Baraka Mtindo Fashion Accessories is just one of the business entities Kenya SBDC supports in Kiambu County.

So far, Kenya SBDC has served more than 9, 000 MSMEs, 60% of them being women. Besides this, the project has helped MSMEs access more than Kes. 188, 615, 414 which have been used to scale up their businesses.

Kenya SBDC is one of the three-pronged approaches of the USAID Strategic Partnership Program (USPP).  USPP is a five-year program funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) being implemented by Strathmore University Business School (SBS) to build resilient and sustainable businesses for social-economic transformation. Besides Kenya SBDC, the program also implements the Transformational Resilience Programming Project, whose focus is to revolutionize the Arid and Semi-arid counties of Kenya.