Kula Is: A Ripple Effect Throughout the Community
Our Women’s Centers were first dreamed up as a place for the daughters of coffee farmers who have had to drop out of school and have little direction for the future. Over the years we’ve seen the ways that skills training, mentorship and supportive community can help craft a vision where the way forward had previously been unclear.
Alice Uwimana joined the Kula Fellowship Program in 2018 at the age of 20; since her father was paralized many years earlier the family had struggled to make ends meet, and Alice hadn’t been able to continue attending school after primary. Resorting to basic farming with her family, she felt purposeless and unskilled.
Before diving into tailoring training, Kula’s Women’s Center curriculum begins with an intensive business training module, teaching the foundations of business principles. Upon beginning the program Alice was energized by this, and soon began selling firewood and tomatoes at the market and investing her income into the newly formed group savings circle. As the program courses continued into tailoring training she worked hard to create quality items and started selling bags locally, saving enough income to purchase her own sewing machine before the program had ended. This was just the beginning for her.
While she continued making and selling clothes and accessories after graduation, she also purchased a second and third sewing machine and began offering tailoring training classes of her own, teaching multiple students through the skills she had learned and earning increased income along the way. Today she has a large shop where she works, and recently even expanded to hire a barber and include a hair salon in the space. Alice is brimming with excitement about the future, and for good reason; she believes that not even the sky's the limit of what she can achieve.
For students at our Women’s Centers, the gap between struggling and thriving often feels huge, but we’ve come to believe that it is small, and that they are so capable of closing it.
