I Showed Up for The Sky Training and It Changed Me. I am a better entrepreneur and mother because I was able to transform my life with the entrepreneurship skilling I received from Feminature; my children are on a more steady path of life now because I save more than before and invest wisely – Tracy Zuharia Sherina
Tracy Zuharia Sherina, 29, is an entrepreneur of Pajulu Sub-County in Arua City. Before the pandemic, Tracy owned a bar business in Pajulu Trading Centre called Janice Café. Her bar business was booming in its area of operation attracting as many customers as possible. After the Covid-19 pandemic, her world and business collapsed.
About the Skilling Youth for Increased Employability – SKY Project: The Community enterprise identification, development and management Program is a development program that seeks to offer market-driven training to the marginalized youth groups i.e. teenage mothers, out of school youth, street youth and the unemployed youth fraternity of Arua district and its surrounding communities. Under this program falls the Skilling Youth (SKY) for Increased Employability by December 2022 project. The development of this project is hinged on situational facts and statistics that reflect the lamentable plight of young people in the district and surrounding communities particularly in the face of and amidst the ravaging and scavenging COVID-19 pandemic. The objectives of the project were to increase out-of-school youth employability through foundational livelihood development and life skilling, to steer mindset, change for success in the labour market, and to enhance the survival and growth of youth self-start ups in Arua.
However, in 2020, when the country suffered the devastating effects of the Covid 19 pandemic that instantly led to a total lockdown of the country and death of many of her customers, her bar business closed. For two years she had no source of income to sustain herself.
She saw the call for expression of interest to attend the SKY Training, she applied and received the training. Upon completion of her training, she started a business in the name Shanlee Groceries.
She stated that when she started Shanlee Groceries, she didn’t know how to save and pay herself off of the business. She was not keeping track of how much she invested in and earned from her business.
The SKY Project Training assisted her to learn the art of saving, record keeping for all business transactions and how to package her products in order to attract more customers.
Feminature also helped me become more active in my community, I feel I have a voice to speak out on issues in my community and I am more confident of my choices.
She further mentioned that the SKY Training prepared her to grow her business by investing in modern equipment for making cakes.
Prior to SKY Project Training, I used the local method to bake my cakes where I would heat the soil in the source pan, batter the cake and place it in the saucepan to rise. The disadvantage with this method was that sometimes the soil would spill over into the cake, the cakes were not receiving a balanced supply of heat leaving them half baked, the method was slow and wasteful. With the skills of saving that I acquired from the training, she saved and bought an electric oven. Using the electric oven saves time, it’s convenient and I am able to make and supply many orders within the short time.
In addition, with the electric oven, she is able to make other products including; doughnuts, bread, and groundnuts that she supplies to her neighboring shops.
The SKY project adopts a broad base approach to key entrepreneurial aspects including effective communication skills, basic concepts of entrepreneurship, business skills, developing of business plans, market study/analysis, customer identification, management and retention, sales and negotiation, price setting, profit calculations & debt management, budgeting, cash flow planning, business & record keeping, leadership & team building/networking, savings & investments, taxation and risk management among others. The project has a rich content that is customized into booklets to facilitate self-study at their convenience with a focus on effective and efficient enterprise set-up, management and survival. After active trainings, we move on to mentoring sessions to provide additional content and training on sustainability and scaling.
