As a successful businesswoman, have you mentored other women?

It has been repeatedly said that Uganda is the one of most entrepreneurial country in the world.
 Every year, thousands of businesses open, and the beauty is that a big chunk of these businesses are owned by women. 
For instance, the 2021 MasterCard Index of Women Entrepreneurs (MIWE) shows Botswana (38.5percent), Uganda (38.4 percent), and Ghana (37.2 percent) as the countries with the most women business owners globally.
 
This means that their incomes increase, there is economic progress and this in turn leads to increased livelihood security, and improved quality of their lives, and the lives of their loved ones.
In the case of Uganda, a report by the World Bank collection of development indicators showed that a total of 18,862 new businesses were registered in 2018. Wow!
However, it has also been noted that the more businesses open up, the closure rate is also high. Many businesses hardly survive to celebrate their fifth birthday. This is attributed to several factors such as poor management, limited capital, inflation, and poor customer handling, among others. 

Holding other factors constant, let us look at the challenge of poor management. 
Many Ugandans including women likely start their businesses without any prior skills and knowledge of how to run a business effectively and successfully. 

They start business ventures for the sake of earning small money to survive rather than having a bigger vision for their businesses.
The majority of people who start businesses want them to grow, and expand but may lack the skills and knowledge of how.  
So, in this era where different players are coming up with innovative ways to promote entrepreneurship opportunities for women and girls, to promote gender equality, we must look at the aspect of having successful women in businesses brought on board to mentor fellow women, especially women with small start-ups. 

Uganda is not short of women who have succeeded in business and can mentor others. We have examples of Julian Adyeri, Nina Karugaba, Sarah Kizito, Mariam Luwombo, and Judy Rugasira Kyanda to mention but a few. 
It would be important for such women to mentor young, and upcoming female entrepreneurs in Uganda by sharing their knowledge, skills, and wisdom on how they have managed to succeed. 
Young women interested in pursuing a career in entrepreneurship must also be willing to learn, be guided, and mentored. 

Recently, I was honoured to be invited to attend a Uganda Women in Business Summit in Kampala organised by Zoho Africa, a corporation that offers a wide range of cloud-based business software solutions. 
The summit aimed at encouraging businesswomen in Uganda to embrace the use of technology to manage their operations more efficiently, but also keep up with the technological advancement in business management.  

From my observation, 80 percent of the female attendees were young women with small start-ups trying to establish themselves in various businesses both online and offline, who hadn’t only come to learn, but also network.
I saw a burning desire to learn how to succeed in their respective businesses from the questions they were asking from panelists, who were all women.

For a long time, the business world has been mainly male-dominated not only in Uganda but globally. It is in recent times that women are also coming up. 
For women who have made it in business, the onus is on you, to mentor others, especially the young girls and women embracing entrepreneurship, and those in small-medium enterprises so that they can find their footing in the business sphere. In the long term, we shall have many more sustainable businesses. 

Don’t win alone, it is said the view at the top is beautiful, but lonely if you are there alone.  
Sustainable entrepreneurship contributes toward the realisation of sustainable development goal eight which looks at promoting inclusive and sustainable economic growth, employment, and decent work for all.

With high levels of unemployment in Uganda, it is paramount to support initiatives and or businesses developed by Ugandans aimed at providing jobs, and that includes providing mentorship opportunities for young people in business including women and girls.
We need to change the narrative from having many business start-ups failing, to many sustainable ones.
                Vivian Agaba,             journalist