When you enter a YOSEFO community bank you are sure to encounter business owners facing every stage of the business life cycle. Some entrepreneurs are just getting their ventures off the ground and are using their loan money to purchase their first sewing machine, food stuffs or rent a salon space. Other businesses are flourishing, sales are growing and customers are becoming more regular. A few businesses are on the decline; higher prices for goods or a new industry regulation could be making it hard to maintain profits....
Continue Reading >>Stories tagged with Tanzania
The entrepreneurs that apply for loan money in Tanzania face all the typical challenges of a small business in the United States or Europe – recruiting and training staff, marketing their business to new and existing customers and finding suppliers with good prices – but they also have to contend with another set of challenges associated with operating in a country that doesn’t have a reliable infrastructure. Their unpredictable working environment became crystal clear to me on Saturday as I spent the day idle without power or water in my home in the Sinza...
Continue Reading >>Hi, I’m Roxanne Miller from San Francisco, CA. I am a Kiva Fellow volunteering this summer with Kiva’s partner Youth Self Employment Foundation (YOSEFO) in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. I arrived in Tanzania in the middle of May and will be working here until the beginning of August.
The first two weeks have been amazing and I’m learning so much from this experience. Swahili and English are the national languages of Tanzania but Swahili is much preferred over English, so I’m first trying to learn enough...
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