Location: Kasenga
Village: Israel
Chief: Mshawa
Age: 50
Sex: Female
Marital Status: Separated
This is a story of ATALIA MBEWE aged 50 years old. After her separation from her husband, Atalia had to fend for her three children alone. Life became so difficult for her and she started doing piece works for their survival. When the CLAP project was introduced, Atalia was selected by the Community Child Labour Committee (CCLC) to be part of the adult literacy learners in Kasenga community. She was very excited because she only went up to primary grade 4 as such she was unable to read or write not at the time of the enrolment. However, after a few months of learning under CLAP, she is now able to read in local language, write letters and numbers properly. Atalia further says she can now solve mathematical problems be it addition, subtraction, division or multiplication. This has helped her in doing business and she can give proper change unlike before when she could not calculate change for customers or calculate profits and losses.
When she received the K250 CLAP soft loan in June 2019, Atalia started a business of selling tomatoes and cooking oil. She narrates that she arrived at this business after analysing the market on what would bring in profits quickly. According to Atalia, she started by buying tomatoes at K180 (6 boxes@K30) which gave her a K60 profit which gave her K240 and she added the K70 which she kept from the k250 bringing her total to K310 . She then decided to buy 20 litres cooking oil @ K265 and tomatoes @K90. When buying the tomatoes, she topped up her own K45 in order to maximise her profits which gave her K75 profit while the cooking oil gave her a profit of K65. She has continued buying and selling of the same products and in 3 months she managed to raise K750 and thus saved K300 in the CLAP project village Bank. Additionally, from her profits, Atalia was able to buy some building materials for the house she is currently occupying. “My life has changed and I can now boast of earning my own money, before people used to call me names because of begging” says Atalia. She is grateful to SPRIZ and JTI for the CLAP project which has also helped others in the community. She adds that she is now able to support her 15 years old daughter with school requisites and her advice to other women is have discipline when doing business and not to always look for big capital before starting a business.