Woyneshet Kassa, 32, carefully brushes dirt from a potato in a cultivation shed at her family’s homestead. Beside her, Worknesh Fufa, 38, rolls potatoes back and forth along a suspended bed, which holds hundreds of the germinating vegetables. The spacious timber shed, known as a diffused light storage (DLS) facility, is filled with thousands of medium-sized, brown and white potatoes neatly arranged on racks.
The structure is in Woliso, a small village in Ethiopia’s Shewa zone, where Kassa and her family live as subsistence farmers cultivating a variety of vegetables for consumption and sale. Having spent most of her life toiling on her family’s land with her husband and three children, Kassa first encountered iDE when they visited her village in 2022. She enrolled in the organization’s “Her Time to Grow” program, which provided localized agricultural and business training to Kassa and 25 other men and women from her community.
Woyneshet Kassa and Worknesh Fufa are members of a five person, women led and family run cooperative engaged in potato seed multiplication in Waliso, Southwest Shewa Zone, Ethiopia, as part of the iDE, HTTG program. Image: Nahom Tesfay for iDE
For iDE, Women Entrepreneurs Are Key to Ending Poverty and Driving Prosperity
Founded in 1982 by entrepreneur and psychiatrist Paul Polak, iDE is a global development organization dedicated to “powering entrepreneurs to end poverty” through agriculture, nutrition, water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH). Rather than providing cookie-cutter “solutions” that only last for the short term, iDE spends the time required to understand problems and co-develop lasting solutions adapted to each context. Supporting local entrepreneurs, with a focus on women, iDE implements market-based interventions across Africa, Central America, and Asia, so far helping more than 40 million people.
A large body of evidence shows that when women have access to productive resources and financial inclusion, they invest back into their homes and communities at a higher rate than men — including in their children’s health and education. That’s why in September, iDE launched a new campaign called Project Fury: Igniting the Power of Women to End Poverty. The campaign promotes iDE’s ten-year strategy with the goal of powering 1 million women entrepreneurs to foster prosperity in their communities for 100 million people. Already every $1 donated to the organization translates into at least $10 in increased incomes for program participants.
For Kassa, participating in “Her Time to Grow” — an initiative closely aligned with Project Fury — was a significant step forward. She is one of 25,000 women who will be enrolled in the program across Sub-Saharan Africa (Zambia, Ethiopia and Ghana) over three years. Funded by Global Affairs Canada, the program has been designed to enhance economic empowerment, well-being and inclusive growth, helping to advance iDE’s broader Project Fury goals.
Woyneshet Kassa and Worknesh Fufa, and family are members of a five person, women led and family run cooperative engaged in potato seed multiplication in Waliso, Southwest Shewa Zone, Ethiopia, as part of the iDE, HTTG program. Image: Nahom Tesfay for iDE
Microfinance Changes Gender Norms in Woloso for Women like Kassa
After completing iDE training, Kassa, Fufa, and three other participants formed a cooperative to cultivate potatoes. With iDE’s assistance, they applied for a loan to purchase 1000 kg of potato seed, organic fertilizers, and pesticides. iDE also supported the group to acquire materials including metal roofing and nails to build the DLS facility, enabling year-round seed storage and propagation using the techniques they learned in the program.
But it wasn’t easy for Kassa and Fufa to get their potato business off the ground. They faced a number of challenges related to negative gender norms, and cultural and social barriers that had to be overcome. For example, in Woliso, land is scarce and is usually passed from one generation to the next along patriarchal lines, limiting women’s ability to generate generational wealth. At the same time, their ability to focus on building their business came into tension with both unpaid care and work responsibilities both in the home as well as unpaid seasonal labor support on family farms.
To address this power imbalance, iDE Ethiopia conducted gender training within households. For Kassa and Fufa, this meant gaining the support of their husbands when it came to the women making key decisions at home and on the farm. Along with the training the women accessed, the support and partnership of their husbands has greatly increased their confidence and enabled them to have more control over their own finances and futures.
They now say they feel more equal to their male counterparts. “I am working, I have my income, and I’m growing in my career,” Kassa said. “I wasn’t confident enough to speak like this before. Now I’m very confident. I have changed.”
When it came to growing the business, negative social and cultural norms around the perceived risk of investing in women, and limited access to essential resources like irrigation equipment created problems for the pair. “There was a taboo where a woman doesn’t take a loan because her husband and the community fear how she returns that money,” Fufa explained. “They [the community] don’t trust women with money, which is a big challenge.” However, the cooperative they belong to managed to access finance through a combination of personal and group savings. Although local microfinance institutions were initially skeptical, requiring husbands to be present as witnesses, the women successfully repaid their first loan and secured a second one. “Previously, only men could take loans, with women signing as witnesses. Now, women can take loans themselves and sign as witnesses — a complete reversal,” Kassa told iDE.
For many women taking part in the project, gender roles have not only changed when it comes to business, they’ve also changed at home with husbands taking an active role in raising children. “I now collaborate with my husband. When I’m farming, he stays at home and does household work.” Initially focused on potato production, the co-op has diversified into processing wild banana leaves, using machinery provided by another organization and funding from the second loan.
Big changes like this start at the local level, and the investments that iDE is driving in partnership with local entrepreneurs are contributing to that change, not only for the women they invest in, but also for their communities and beyond.
iDE’s mission is to end global poverty, and they believe catalyzing the power of local markets is the best way to do this. They work with local entrepreneurs, with a focus on women, who connect underserved, last-mile markets with products and services that enable people to move up the economic ladder, and that contribute to their wellbeing. Rather than providing cookie-cutter “solutions” that only last for the short term, iDE spends the time required to really understand problems and to co-develop lasting solutions adapted to each context. They work in the sectors of agriculture, WASH, nutrition and climate change resilience across 12 countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and have impacted more than 40 million people to date.
You can support and learn more about Project Fury Here, and follow iDE on social media here in LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.