Empowering women in the Gambia

My goal is to empower women who own small businesses in Africa

As a child growing up in the Gambia, I made hundreds of trips to the market with my mother to buy groceries. The scene is a network of buyers and sellers, usually women doing the selling — who make their profit selling mostly vegetables and seafood, and then using their earnings to buy groceries for their own families. Unfortunately, the scene of many Gambian markets haven’t changed much, and nor has the financial well-being of most of the women who support this infrastructure.

My goal is to create a company made up of a group of technologists, strategists, data scientists, and financial services specialists, to empower women who own these hundreds of thousands of businesses with the funds they need to grow; to work directly with them to understand their business and make sure our services suits their business needs.

But most importantly, I want to give them the luxury of financial security, by spending lots of time making sure female entrepreneurs are educated about savings, different funding options and the capital raising process. We would do this by utilizing our people and capital to help them have access to an account, a card, and an app — all working together to help them understand and manage their spending.

With that base, we would allocate some of that capital from their accounts and inject it back into the economy by helping other small businesses get the funding they need.