A woman farmer selling her produce at a local market in Casamence, southern Senegal. In sub-Saharan Africa, 90 percent of those in informal employment, which is typically low-skilled with poor working conditions, are women. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
HYDERABAD , Jul 20 2020 (IPS)

Growing up in the Senegalese capital of Dakar, Siny Samba (28) watched with fascination as her grandmother made snacks for her family, using the fresh fruit from their garden. She would often help her grandma make these snacks to feed the neighbourhood children.

“One day, I am going to have snack parties for children like Granny does,” Samba would tell herself.

But years later, when she visited local stores to buy fruit preserves, she was disappointed to see only expensive, imported products on the shelves. They neither tasted as fresh as her Grandma’s ones, nor where they as high in nutritional value.

So in 2017, armed with a degree in food processing engineering from France, Samba launched Senegal’s first baby food startup – Le Lionceau (The Lion Cub). Her goal: to provide Senegalese mothers and infants with a choice of locally-processed food, made from organic, fresh farm produce.

Initially, she started with three types of fruit jams. But now, three years later, she has expanded to 15 products, including jam, jelly, marmalade, cereal and biscuits. Her company now employs nine people and also trains fruit and vegetable farmers across Senegal in safe harvesting techniques and safer storage methods as well as the organic certification process. 

“We have a very simple philosophy: make the best use of our country-grown fruits and vegetables and sell to people who love feeding their children healthy, nutritional products. So, we are building a business that sustains and improves the local food value chain and organic farmers while providing high quality food to Senegalese people,” Samba tells IPS.

Senegal – a fertile ground for startups

Samba’s Le Lionceau is one of the many startups that have mushroomed up across Senegal in recent years.

According to VC4A — an organisation that provides technical and financial support to startup ventures globally and in Senegal — there are 128 registered startups in the West African nation, over a dozen of which are owned by women.

However, it is often assumed that the number of women-owned startups are much higher as many women entrepreneurs hesitate to register their businesses due to high taxes, which include 18 percent Value Added Tax (VAT) and 30 percent company taxes.

The figures are not unusual for the continent.

“Participation in informal employment that is typically low-skilled and comes with poor working conditions is higher among women than men. In 2018, this was the case in more than 90 percent of sub-Saharan African countries,” states a policy document by the Deliver for Good campaign, which promotes 12 crucial investments in women and girls, including dramatically reducing gender-based violence; the respect, protection and fulfilment of sexual health and rights; ensuring equitable and quality education as well as boosting women’s economic empowerment.

However, the introduction of the Senegal Startup Act promises to provide support for startups, while easing their tax burden.

The law was passed in December 2019 after 19 months of intense consultation and discussions among 60 Senegalese innovation enthusiasts, 20 startup supporter organisations and government representatives, including the tax authority, and the education and economy and finance ministries.

The law aims to promote and provide tax breaks and other benefits to innovative new businesses in various fields, ranging from food and agriculture to health and mobile banking. Senegal is only the second African country after Tunisia to have such a law supporting startups.

Perhaps it will create an encouraging environment for women entrepreneurs, but the law itself has no special provisions for them. 

“The new law is really a big ball of hope for all of us who have started without any external help and were struggling to create everything from scratch, like consumer awareness, training of suppliers, creating a conducive market, building infrastructure etc,” says Samba.

Giving the information women need

• In Senegal, 49.9 percent of women of reproductive age have anaemia, says the global nutrition report which profiles the burden of malnutrition at the global, regional, sub-regional and country level.
• In children the rate of acute malnutrition is nine percent, which is higher than the developing country average of 8.5 percent, the report states.

Despite the high burden of challenges, resources are always inadequate, say many experts.

There is never enough credible information available to mothers on malnutrition, nor is there enough funding for those who are working to improve women’s and children’s health, says Fatou Ndiaye Turpin, the executive director of Réseau Siggil Jigéen (RSJ), a women’s rights organisation that aims to promote and protect women’s rights in Senegal.

RSJ is also one of the convenors of the Deliver for Good campaign coalition in Senegal, which is part of a larger, global campaign powered by Women Deliver. 

Seynabou Thiam, a Dakar-based digital entrepreneur and mother of two young children, agrees with Turpin. In Senegal, there isn’t enough credible information in the public domain on issues that mothers need such as childcare, child nutrition, mothers’ health and well-being etc., Thiam tells IPS.

In 2013, Thiam founded Yaay.sn, a social networking group for mothers that aims to close this information gap. The network, Senegal’s first digital social community, has over 12,000 members.

Using blogs, posters, videos and photographs as resources, Yaay.sn offers Senegalese mothers the information they need about childcare, nutrition and health though a platform that allows them to connect, share their problems and seek support from each other.

Thiam  has won several awards for her startup, including the Female Digital Enterprise Award in 2015 and Africa Digital Communication Days Awards 2019.

“We currently have two major platforms – a group page on Facebook and a channel on Youtube. The construction of our website has already started, so technically, we are in a transition phase right now. But I am hopeful that our website will be completed and operational soon,” Thiam tells IPS.

In 2011, only 15 percent of Senegalese had access to the internet, according to World Bank data. But today, less than a decade later, the number has dramatically increased to 58 percent. The rapid digitisation is an encouraging factor for women who have the potential to become digital entrepreneurs, says Thiam.

“Women have a systemic approach to business. Sustainability is always at the back of their mind, even as they create wealth. They also constantly think of the welfare of those around them – including their families,” Thiam tells IPS.

Women sell farm produce in Casamence, southern Senegal. Evidence shows that women’s full participation in the economy drives better performing and more resilient businesses and supports economic growth and wider development goals for nations. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

Joining the Fight Against COVID

Gaelle Tall is the co-founder and chief sales officer of Paps, an e-logistics start-up that provides delivery services across Senegal. When the COVID-19 crisis began to effect the country, which has no online grocery stores, Tall quickly added a new service to Pap’s offers: delivery of food, water and hygiene products to people living under lockdown restrictions.

Another health startup which has been quick to join the fight against COVID-19 is SenVitale, which created the Passeport Universelle de Santé.

Launched in 2017 and co-founded by 22-year-old Nafissatou Diouf, the Passeport Universelle de Santé is a QR scan of a patient’s medical data that is integrated on a card, bracelet, or a pendant. Doctors can instantly access patient medical data by scanning the QR code.

When the COVID-19 outbreak reached Senegal, SenVitale created a web platform where citizens can take a coronavirus self-assessment test before approaching a medical facility. So far, over 100,000 people have taken the test, thereby taking some burden off a stressed national health service. Senegal has over 8,000 cases reported. 

“I lost my aunt who died mainly because she couldn’t find enough information on her sickness. So, we wanted to find a system that would help our doctors and health practitioners act faster,” Diouf, who won Best Startup of the Year (Senegal) awards and also the Feminine Coup de Coeur awards in 2019, tells IPS.

Areas awaiting urgent interventions

Senegal’s population, currently 16.7 million, is expected to rise to 22.3 million by 2030.

“In such a context, reproductive health programmes for young and inactive populations are essential for Senegal to capture the demographic dividend and for the country’s economic and social situation to improve,” Turpin tells IPS.
She identified four crucial areas of women’s health that urgently need greater attention: maternal mortality, access to contraception, information on reproductive health and investment.

The current volume of investment and attention to all of these four areas remains inadequate, although some NGOs are providing services, Turpin says.

“The NGOs are closely linked to public health structures and most of the time operate as referral clinics for public sector clients. These NGOs also create digital platforms to facilitate access to information and products on sexual and reproductive health,” she adds, admitting that no start-up business has stepped into the reproductive health area with a bankable service.

Perhaps its time for a woman to take on the challenge. “Evidence shows that women’s full participation in the economy drives better performing and more resilient businesses and supports economic growth and wider development goals for nations,” Women Deliver notes in a policy brief.

Meanwhile, female entrepreneurs like Samba are trying to add value to their current services by making videos on health, food quality, nutrition, organic food and the need for building immunity through the consumption of fresh, healthy food.

The videos in Senegal’s main indigenous language, Wolof, are free and handed to women and girls who purchase her products.

“Working for health, nutrition and food is hard,” she says, explaining that remains a lack of funding and infrastructure, taxes are high and there are many cultural barriers.

“For example, when I go for a business appointment with my male co-founder, people speak to him and ignore me,” Samba says.

But she believes things are changing.

“But (there are) many organisations providing training to women entrepreneurs, there are networking facilities. There is a new law plus the opportunity to improve women and children’s health. So, it’s an exciting time to have a startup.”

There has been robust growth in Internet access and usage over the past few years and Africa is now primed to take advantage of the social and economic opportunities that Internet can bring to people across the continent, according to Kathy Brown, President and CEO of the Internet Society.

Speaking at the Africa Internet Summit (AIS) being held in the Tunisian capital from Jun. 2 to 5, Brown highlighted the progress made in recent years to bring improved Internet access and availability to more people in Africa, noting how this growth has provided a strong foundation for stimulating opportunity through an enabling environment defined by inclusion, innovation and entrepreneurship.

“Africa’s recent economic growth rates and growing entrepreneurial spirit are combining to create a climate of opportunity,” said Brown.

“Advances in Internet infrastructure and the meteoric rise of the mobile Internet have already transformed the African technology landscape. I believe that Africa’s Internet is now at a tipping point, poised for further positive change and expansion as the continent looks forward with confidence to the future.”

However, she noted that there are still barriers which must be overcome in order to capture the full economic and social promise of the Internet. While connectivity is on the rise and available bandwidth in Africa has increased significantly, challenges for the African Internet business ecosystem still include factors such as the cost of broadband, online fraud, lack of local content and fragmented markets.

“Africa is now the frontier for the next wave of Internet progress,” said Brown. “While there is huge potential for Africa to continue building an Internet that will best serve its needs and its people, it is critical that true collaboration across Africa’s technical community, a culture of innovation and a spirit of entrepreneurship form part of this process.

The Internet Society stands with Africa to continue the great momentum under way to overcome challenges and enable the economic and social possibilities that only a truly open, trusted Internet can deliver.”

The Internet Society is an international, non-profit organisation founded in 1992 to provide leadership in Internet-related standards, education and policy.

Edited by Phil Harris   

A schoolgirl on Geziret el-Dahab island, Cairo. Credit: Rachel Williamson/IPS

By Rachel Williamson
CAIRO, Nov 20 2013 (IPS)

The Middle East has some of the best and worst education systems in the world and they are attracting the attention of entrepreneurs keen to make a difference – and a buck.

Entrepreneurs are using internet and mobile technology to create products to supplement or even, as in the case of TAGUINI e-university in Jordan, supplant traditional educational systems. Start-ups like the Hilaal Animation Workshop in Dubai and Ibtaker in Palestine are teaching in-classroom courses and developing ICT education kits.

But business people and experts are divided over the impact these organisations could make, given the shortcomings of the Arab world’s education systems. Some are sceptical about whether these companies are worthwhile for-profit ventures or merely social enterprises.

Hossam Allam, founder of Cairo Angels, a platform to link entrepreneurs and investors, believes that education is a field for NGOs not businesses. Allam told IPS that all the start-ups he has seen are not very profitable with limited potential for local and international growth.

Co-founder of Cairo business incubator Flat6Labs, Hany Sonbaty, said private companies are only able to work on the perimeter of heavily regulated state education systems.

“Education is governed in every place on earth by the national curriculum and standardised tests so unless that changes…,” he told IPS, adding that the only thing outsiders could do was to give people the tools to educate themselves further, if they were so inclined.

But Jordanians Lamia Tubbaa-Bibi and Rama Jardeneh disagree.

They own Little Thinking Minds, one of a growing number of online business producing Arabic-language television programmes for pre- and primary school children, which, they say, is an area ripe for private sector intervention.

“Many children enter primary schools [both public and private] unable to read or write Arabic properly and have a very limited pool of vocabulary,” Jardeneh told IPS, explaining that too much emphasis was placed on children learning English.

She said that her children, who attend a top private school in Jordan, struggle because they do not have a wider English and Arabic vocabulary.

The World Economic Forum’s 2013-2014 Global Competitiveness Report ranked Egypt’s primary school system as the worst in the world, and its overall education sector was ranked 145 of the 148 countries surveyed.

Yet Lebanon, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are respectively ranked 7th, 11th and 19th in the world for their primary education sectors, with Qatar being ranked third for the quality of their overall education.

“We wish to strengthen their language skills and enhance their vocabulary and introduce early reading as well so that by the time they are seven they enter school well-equipped,” Jardeneh said.

A May report “Unlocking Arab Youth Entrepreneurship Potential” by entrepreneurship training NGO Injaz al Arab highlights the flaws in education systems across the region. The report found that schools are focused on rote learning and memorisation rather than problem solving and critical thinking.

“Youth enter the transition from school to work without the competitive edge needed to secure gainful employment in a tight labour market,” the report states.

According to global entrepreneurship NGO Endeavor, 39 percent of  Middle East/North Africa (MENA) companies say their biggest problem is an inadequately educated workforce. In a region where over half the population is under the age of 25 and over a quarter of those is unemployed – this is a serious problem.

But entrepreneurs, like Lana Karrain, are also getting involved in career guidance and jobs skills training. Karrain is hoping to help reduce youth unemployment with her Jordan-based career matching and job skills training website, Fakker. It uses game-based software to show graduates where their skills lie and what they need to work on.

“Students lack communication and presentation skills from an early age,” she told IPS, adding that it was important for Jordan, especially, to invest in its youthful human capital because it had no natural resources.

Curriculum change is a touchy topic in countries around the world, but in places like Egypt it is a political one.

Deena Boraie, associate dean at the American University of Cairo’s School of Continuing Education, said this was partly because the government feared the potential for “tampering” by foreign parties, and partly due to suspicions that the private sector was trying to make money off state education.

“Because education is highly political … I don’t think it’s a matter of time, I think it’s a matter of the ability to communicate and … it’s very hard now for the private sector to penetrate the public sector,” she told IPS.

Boraie said private enterprises might be more influential in altering the education systems of countries such as Jordan or Lebanon because of their smaller populations of about 6.3 million and 4.4 million respectively.

In Egypt, with its population of 80 million, the sheer volume of students means a small change will not be very effective or visible.

However, the clear preference for online- and technology-based products and services will widen the “digital divide” between tech “haves” and “have-nots”, says Muhammad Faour, an education reform expert with the think tank Carnegie Middle East Centre in Beirut.

“The problem with online courses or training is you may be targeting a special class of students, because particularly in areas where children or students are poor they may not have access to computers or [the] internet because they cannot afford it,” he told IPS.

The end result is that young adults entering the workforce who come from poor backgrounds cannot compete with those who have had extra digital training.

However, the lack of enthusiasm from the experts is not deterring entrepreneurs like Tubbaa-Bibi and Jardeneh.

They agree it is very difficult to penetrate educational bureaucracies and get their books and DVDs into school libraries, but they are developing proposals to design a curriculum for children up to six years for U.S. Agency for International Development funded projects.

“We strongly believe [and we are in the process of] forging partnerships with schools, NGOs and other educational institutions,” Jardeneh said in an email.

“Our goal is to have our products incorporated within the curricula of all Ministry of Education schools in the region.”

As long as governments fail to provide the level of education they promised or that parents expect, private enterprises like Little Thinking Minds and Fakker will rise – out of opportunity and necessity – to address the shortfalls.

EduKitten founders Sarah Abunar, COO (left) and Rana Said, CEO (right); absent is Ahmed Galal, marketing. Credit: Rachel Williamson/IPS

By Rachel Williamson
CAIRO, Nov 13 2013 (IPS)

Evidence is mounting to suggest women entrepreneurs are more common in the Middle East than in startup capital Silicon Valley, and some even say it’s a more supportive place for them to start a business.

Yasmin Elayat, an Egyptian-American born and bred in California’s Silicon Valley, told IPS she felt the ecosystem of investors, business mentors and other entrepreneurs in Egypt and the Middle East was more supportive than those in the U.S. or Europe when she began working out the details for her now-inactive media business GroupStream in 2011.

“It’s a more encouraging environment for women entrepreneurs,” she said. “There’s something else going on here, whether you want to call it culture or environment.”

Elayat, 31, said the only time her gender became an issue was in Europe during a three-month startup boot-camp in Copenhagen.

A male entrepreneur from Eastern Europe was dumbfounded to discover that she was not an employee of GroupStream, but the CEO, and on another occasion, after pitching the business to a group, a male mentor directed all his questions towards her male co-founder.

Elayat is one of a growing pool of women in the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region jumping into entrepreneurial ventures, although it’s difficult to pin down just how large that pool is.

A recently released study by Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) suggested women in MENA were the least likely in the world to start a business, with only four percent of the adult female population considered entrepreneurs.

However, a big problem with the study was that it did not include data from startup powerhouses Jordan, Lebanon, the UAE and Qatar (Israel was included separately).

In Jordan the number of female-led startups is closer to one-third, near the global average of 37 percent, and in Egypt, Hossam Allam founder of angel investment group Cairo Angels, told IPS that about half of the businesses invested in so far involved mixed-gender teams.

Moreover, in regional entrepreneur competitions the mix of male and female participants is similar, such as in the 2012 MIT Enterprise Forum Arab Startup Competition where almost half of the competitors were women, as was the winner Hind Hobeika.

The number of women entrepreneurs throughout the region probably lies somewhere in between, at about 15-20 percent. To put this in perspective, the GEM study found 10 percent of the U.S. adult female population was involved in entrepreneurial activity in 2012, and five percent in developed Europe.

There are several reasons for the rise of the woman entrepreneur in the Middle East, and one is that the startup environment has grown up with them.

Not only have multiple business incubators and accelerators sprung up in major cities across the region in the last three years, but so have organisations and competitions specifically targeting women.

These include entrepreneur news and investment website Wamda’s ‘Wamda for Women’ initiative, Lebanese business incubator Berytech’s Women Entrepreneur Competition, the Roudha Foundation in Jordan, AMIDEAST’s Arab Women’s Entrepreneurship Programme – and the list goes on.

Other reasons are rising access to education, and opportunities provided by the internet.
The World Bank says more women in the Middle East now attend university than men, and GroupStream’s Elayat said that compared with her first-year computer engineering course in the U.S., where she was one of two female students, the gender mix when she transferred to the American University in Cairo was “about half-half”.

Co-founder of Arabic-language parenting website Supermama, Yasmine el-Mehairy, said that in contrast to the low numbers of women studying computer science and engineering in Western countries, girls throughout the Arab region were funnelled into the hard-to-enter university science courses because of good high school grades.

“Women are more inclined to work harder during high school, so it was easier for them to get higher grades, where men were more interested in PlayStation and football,” she said.

“It was natural selection for you to go based on your grades to the university that was more prestigious or do the majors that were more prestigious [such as science and engineering].”

The Economist’s Ludwig Siegele wrote in July that the number of women-led startup businesses could flourish further because the internet wasn’t inherently male-dominated and also enabled highly educated women to start a home-based business if, as in Saudi Arabia, her family might object if she went outside to work.

But make no mistake – the unique challenges faced by women entrepreneurs in the Middle East are vast, from the wearying day-to-day frustrations to deeply rooted ideas about a woman’s place in society.

The 2013 Wamda for Women roundtable events in Cairo, Doha, Amman and Riyadh illustrated the difficulties women entrepreneurs in these countries face.

Generally the difficulties were the fight to be seen an equals; a dearth of role models; the challenge of balancing family and work commitments; and male bias.

Fida Taher, Jordanian media executive and founder of cookery website Zaytouneh, agrees.

She told Chris Schroeder, author of Startup Rising: The Entrepreneurial Revolution Remaking the Middle East: “First, some men get intimidated by a strong woman.

“Second, others – and I will try to sound as proper as possible – think a business relationship with a woman should be a personal one. Finally, some men underestimate women in general, and believe that women are not capable of delivering good results.”

Sarah Abu Nar, 28, co-founder of Egyptian company EduKitten which sells Arabic-language edutainment apps, explained her real-life experiences of these issues.

They included convincing investors the two women would and could put as much time into the business as their male co-founder, and people telling them they couldn’t run a business because they needed that time to look after their home, husbands and family.

But she also had a solution, one followed often out of necessity by all the entrepreneurial businesswomen spoken to by IPS.

“Don’t waste your time talking to people, convincing them you’re good… Don’t waste your time doing all this, do your actions and then your actions will speak louder than your words.”

A worker bends over the rows of flowers in one of Rubeena Begum's polyhouses. Credit: Athar Parvaiz/IPS

By Athar Parvaiz
SRINAGAR, India, Jul 9 2013 (IPS)

As a little girl, Rubeena Begum had big plans: she would become a doctor and secure a decent income working in one of the 30 hospitals in the Himalayan state of Kashmir in north India.

She had pictured sterile medical establishments and well-lit corridors that reeked of disinfectant, never dreaming that she would one day make a living in a much more organic environment.

Standing in front of a handsome collection of polythene-covered greenhouses, or polyhouses, Rubeena points proudly to the fragrant blossoms inside – Lilium, gladiolus, gerberas, carnations, lavender and Bulgarian roses – that have changed her life forever.

She does not cultivate these flowers for their aromatic and medicinal properties alone: they also fetch her a tidy sum at the local market, enough that she has been able to pay back a considerable portion of the loans she took to get this floriculture business off the ground.

Starting with just three polyhouses erected on half an acre of land in the Budgam district of Kashmir in 2006, Rubeena has doubled her business in six years, and now manages 12 growing units.

Banks that once baulked at the idea of providing a loan to this intrepid young woman – demanding countless documents as proof that she would be able to repay – now approach her with offers of even bigger loans to sustain her successful venture.

Rubeena tells IPS that she has become the veritable poster child for entrepreneurship in Kashmir, where half a million out of roughly ten million people are jobless.

Experts blame this dire situation on the armed conflict that has gnawed at every aspect of life in this scenic yet troubled state for over two decades.

Every year over 2,500 young people graduate from Kashmiri universities with Master’s degrees in hand – but those who are unable to bag the few available jobs in the government sector, or in the tourism, agriculture or handicrafts industries, end up searching desperately for work that simply does not exist.

Now, floriculture seems to be offering a way out of a cycle of poverty that many youth were beginning to fear they would never escape.

In full bloom

Rubeena had been on the lookout for employment opportunities when she happened to tune into a radio programme extolling the virtues of agricultural ventures, and of flower cultivation in particular.

“As a child I was always passionate about flowers – I would gather them and decorate my house with them,” she said. “I knew then that this was something I needed to take up.”

After receiving basic training from the Jammu and Kashmir Entrepreneur Development Institute (J&KEDI) on how to erect polyhouses, as well as advice from the floriculture department on the basic growing seasons and harvesting techniques, she set to work.

While reluctant to divulge details of her profits, she readily shared news of having recently expanded her operations by renting 57 acres of land for the cultivation of Bulgarian roses and lavender.

She transports many of her flowers and aromatic oils to collection centres in Kashmir, where they are picked up by distributors who drive them into major urban centres like Delhi, Mumbai and Hyderabad, where flowers for religious festivals, marriage ceremonies and temple offerings are in high demand.

She also sells extracts like rose oil (used in perfumery), rose water (used for cosmetic and medical products) and lavender oil (used in cosmetics and alternative medicines) at her shop in Srinagar’s Sheikh-ul-Alam International Airport.

The Jammu-based Indian Institute of Integrative Medicine (IIIM) also facilitates sales of her products by putting her in touch with buyers interested in the plants’ medicinal properties.

Experts tell IPS that a bunch of 10 high quality carnations or gerberas typically fetch between five and 15 dollars, while a kilogramme of rose oil brings in up to 7,000 dollars in the Indian market.

According to official estimates, Kashmir’s floriculture industry has the potential to generate 100 million dollars a year in revenue, since the blooms here are said to be of exceptionally high quality.

Whether this is due to the crisp, clean mountain air or the rich Himalayan soil does not seem to matter much to the youth who are flocking to the sector.

Shahnawaz Rasool Dar, a youth from downtown Srinagar, recently started cultivating flowers in the Baramulla district on four acres of land.

“I was working in a private company outside Kashmir but after realising the potential of floriculture in Kashmir, I rushed back here,” Dar told IPS at his farm where he cultivates gerberas, carnations and roses.

Dar’s Bismillah Flora Company is still in its infancy, fetching around 4,000 dollars a year, but he says he is confident that he can transform it into a major business operation.

Well educated and tech-savvy, Dar spends hours online researching the best scientific practices such as the ideal distance between rows of flowerbeds and optimal irrigation techniques; he also buys seeds from reputed companies.

According to Kashmir’s Floriculture Department, in the last year alone more than 1,100 youth started growing flowers for a living.

Popular regions for floriculture include the Budgam, Srinagar and Baramulla districts of the Kashmir Valley, a fertile basin of the river Jhelum, where the climate is ideal for nurturing the delicate flowers, according to Sunil Mistri, director of Kashmir’s Floriculture Department.

“The average farmer can earn an additional annual income of 3,000 dollars if he also grows flowers,” Mistri told IPS.

According to Javid Ahmad, a floriculture officer in Budgam, the number of flower-growing farmers reached 375 in the last year. Once registered with his department they are entitled to regular advice from experts and subsidised loans ranging from 3,300 to 16,600 dollars to encourage more people to venture into the field of floriculture.

As Javid was talking to IPS, two young men dropped into the office and expressed their desire to start a flower cultivation project using a small portion of their farmland.

Bashir Ahmad, who graduated from Kashmir University two years ago and has since tried – unsuccessfully – to secure a livelihood cultivating mushrooms, is desperate for an income.

Lured by the many success stories of floriculture entrepreneurs like Rubeena, Bashir is now “quite keen to take this up as a profession,” he told IPS.

Individual ventures have a multiplier effect on employment. For instance, Rubeena now hires 53 workers to tend to the flowers, paying day labourers about five dollars a day, and her regular employees between 70 and 100 dollars per month.

Anxious to capitalise on these developments, the government is laying plans to develop the sector on a national level. Mistri says the floriculture department will soon create cold storage facilities at various centers across Kashmir, to ensure that flowers stay fresh until buyers come for them.

By Siphosethu Stuurman
Dec 20 2011 (IPS)

Young people from across the globe gathered in Benin’s economic capital city of Cotonou to share their success and experiences in the agricultural sector with each other.

By Siphosethu Stuurman
Dec 19 2011 (IPS)

Young Beninese rabbit breeder, Samuel Agossou, inspired youth from across the globe when he shared his success story during the Global Youth Innovation Workshop held in Benin late last year.