- Hannah Conley, Fundraising Intern

My name is Hannah Conley and I am Prosperity Catalyst’s fundraising intern. I recently completed my first year at Babson College, where I am a scholar at the Center for Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership. I am very passionate about issues relating to women in business, women’s empowerment and entrepreneurship so I fell in love with Prosperity Catalyst and its mission when I first heard about the organization. I am thrilled to be working for Prosperity Catalyst and helping the organization fulfill its mission of empowering women from conflict areas with business and entrepreneurship skills.

This past June, I had the great fortune of spending three weeks in Rwanda teaching entrepreneurship and visiting entrepreneurial ventures. In retrospect, a lot of what I saw and learned during my trip to Rwanda is analogous to the issues that Prosperity Catalyst is supporting in Haiti. Much of the experiences allowed me to gain a deeper understanding about social entrepreneurship and get a closer and more meaningful look at the issues women in Rwanda are dealing with on a day to day basis. It also provided me with a lens to examine and understand gender and development issues practitioners and communities are dealing with around the world.

Babson College has started a number of entrepreneurship centers in foreign countries. Babson’s undergraduate school has been ranked number one in entrepreneurship by US News and World Report for the last 19 years. The Babson-Rwanda Entrepreneurship Center was started in 2010 and has built strong relationships with the College of Immaculate Conception in Save and the National University of Rwanda in Butare where we taught over the few weeks. The center has been working with schools, businesses and programs to help cultivate entrepreneurship in the country. I am really happy to have had this great opportunity to be a part of this venture!

During the three weeks, one Babson graduate student and four undergraduates, including myself, taught English, ICT and Entrepreneurship to secondary school and university students. We taught 27 secondary school classes and three National University of Rwanda seminars per week. I was on the entrepreneurship teaching team with my teammate, Leanne and it was particularly exciting because Rwanda has recently made entrepreneurship part of the secondary school curriculum. We had the students work through idea generation and development by creating theoretical business plans and presenting them in the form of Rocket Pitches at the end of the three weeks. We focused on feasibility, originality, and most importantly, the value of social entrepreneurship.

At first, getting used to the students’ learning style was a difficult adjustment for us because the students were only used to rote memorization and regurgitation of material. The kids we worked with had not had exposure to critical thinking and presenting their own ideas. We had them get in front of the class as much as possible to get them to become more comfortable, confident, and to start developing positive body languages. In addition, most students wanted to write business plans for businesses that are already very popular and so we tried to reinforce Babson’s favorite motto – “Don’t be the best in the world at what you do, be the only one in the world that does what you do”. We encouraged them to think out of the box, of business ideas that had not been done before and that would not only be profitable, but would be beneficial to their own community.

We were very lucky to have been able to meet some excellent examples of successful women entrepreneurs in Rwanda. The African Bagel Company (ABC), owned by a Canadian woman, provides basic job training and English lessons to women who have been living on the streets. The mission of the program is to provide employment and skills so that these women can become independent and are able to move on to better jobs within two years of being with ABC.

We also visited the very first and the only ice cream shop in Rwanda, Inzozi Nziza, which in Kinyarwanda means “Sweet Dreams”. The owner and founder is a survivor of the Rwandan genocide and she strives to provide jobs for women and also helps provide English lessons for them after work. She believes in promoting economic growth and hopes that her ice cream shop can provide peacefulness and happiness to people in her country.

We had the chance to have dinner with the National representative for Women for Women International and talk about the plans for the new center in Rwanda that is currently under construction. We also got the opportunity to speak with the director of programs at Alahah, a training program that provides women with an associate’s degree in business and guarantees 100% job placement. We were impressed to learn that the program had grown from 45 students to 425 in just two years!

I had a magnificent time in Rwanda. Every single program and business we visited was extraordinarily inspiring. The drive that the students had was incredible. Their ability to warmly welcome us into their culture, especially with English being their second, or commonly, their third language was amazing. I admired their ability to try new things, especially with our teaching style being so different from what they are used to. I loved watching them open up to us and learning from them everything they had to share with us. I am so happy to have been able to peek at how entrepreneurship is developing in Rwanda.

Now with this wealth of experience in Rwanda and having learned so much about entrepreneurship and empowerment, I am excited to be part of Prosperity Catalyst’s mission in Haiti and beyond.