Voices from the field

Piassa's story: a young woman on her way to entrepreneurship

Piassa Daniel is a 19 year old girl who lives with her family in Nampula, Mozambique. She is not your average teenager: she studies, works at her father’s metal work business, andis a young up-and-coming business entrepreneur.

Piassa has taken part in the Entrepreneurship Curriculum Programme (ECP), which was introduced by the government of Mozambique and UNIDO, and which is now compulsory for thousands of students. She now knows about business plans, budgets and balance sheets. Like her, nearly ¾ of the students start business activities while at school. In addition, the government, together with UNIDO, has established training programmes for teachers in other disciplines. Piassa says: "I feel really good about it. It is said that women can not do as good of a job as men and now I want to prove otherwise…that if you go out and look for it, you can run a business just the same as a man.”

Over a third of the young entrepreneurs are girls, and that is vital as it very difficult for women to partake and take a full role in the economic life of the country.  Most importantly, the programme is now empowering more and more women like Piassa, who said: "People learn that one can work hard to achieve something, to create a business, to make a living and to fight poverty; that is what is important.”

A programme, such as the ECP, is a fundamental investment in Mozambique’s future, by helping youth and young women towards wealth creation, independence and overcoming poverty. By next year 120,000 students will have benefited. Juvenal Nruma, a psychology teacher, assessed the importance of the programme as follows “It is important because it gives young people a new vision of the world, new hope and a new way of being. Learning to make a living and developing communities.”

The programme not only changes the lives of the participants, it also positively modified the perception of the families, including Simao's, Piassa's father: “If my daughter gets to become an entrepreneur; first of all, she will become independent, secondly, she can help the family and ultimately also the country.”

By Andrea Liebman