From a Frying Pan at Dawn to a Grocery Company of Her Own
A year in Asante Africa Foundation’s DEEP program took Emily from selling fried dough before sunrise to running her own business.
Emily’s mornings used to start over a pan of hot oil.
She was just 22 then, a young mother in Turkana County, Kenya. Before sunrise she would be frying mandazi (the sweet fried dough sold at roadside stalls across East Africa) and selling what she could to bring something into a household that included her child and her extended family. She had never held formal employment. There was no money to continue her education, and no obvious way to find any. The hardest part of being a young mother in Turkana, she has said, is caring for a child when there is no steady income to rely on.
What she had instead was a dream she had carried since childhood: to own and run her own business. She never let go of it, even when the people around her did.
“I still believe I will pursue my dream,” she said, before any of this existed.
Then she applied to the Digital Employability and Entrepreneurship Program (DEEP).
DEEP is Asante Africa Foundation’s 9-month hybrid program, equipping rural East African youth aged 18 to 24 with digital, career, and business skills. Emily came in through EmpowerHer, a partnership with Together Women Rise built for young single mothers in rural Kenya. She enrolled hoping to learn something and to find the confidence to speak up in her own community.
She left with a company!
Lalo Grocery
Lalo Grocery sells fresh fruit, vegetables, and other healthy food to the people around her – households, students, working professionals, neighbors – sourced from local suppliers. Fresh produce is hard to come by in her community, and what arrives has usually travelled a long way to get there. Her business is an attempt to shorten that distance, and to keep the money moving inside her own community while it does.
The website is Emily’s own work, written in HTML and CSS: product listings, navigation, a section for customer information, and, at the bottom, the phone number and email address that let a business with no shopfront take an order.
Everything DEEP taught her is somewhere in it. Entrepreneurship, to give an idea a shape. Digital marketing, to bring customers to it. Record keeping, to know what the business is actually doing. Communication, to stand in front of a panel and defend all of it (the problem, the product, the plan) fielding questions about supply, transport, and capital in her second language.
She is not finished. Storage, delivery, and working capital are still to solve, and Emily names those gaps before anyone else can. What has changed is that she is now the one solving them.
Her message to other young mothers hasn’t changed since the day she applied.
“Have your dream. Believe in it. Your time will come.”