Amina Azia Ouro-Agoro participated in the African Women’s Entrepreneurship Program with the U.S. Department of State in July 2018. Here she is displaying one of the products from her company, Minagro Group, at the annual AWEP showcase in Chicago. (State Dept./D.A. Peterson)
A business’s supply chain is one of its most valuable assets. It’s what sets one startup apart from the next, and it can often be the key to making a product or service unique.
A supply chain is what gets a product ready for market. A value chain is what makes a product worth more than the sum of its parts.
When networks of women-led businesses link up in supply chains, they have a multiplier effect on local economies. Greta Schettler sees this from her position as chief operating officer of WEConnect International, a firm that specializes in business-to-business optimization.
“Women hire more women,” she says.
When they do, those women reinvest in their communities by spending most of their earnings on social goods such as health care and education. With more women in the workforce funneling earnings into their communities, local economies grow stronger.
Entrepreneurs can learn how to improve their businesses’ value chains with these tips from a workshop at the 2018 AGOA Forum led by Schettler and three other successful businesswomen.
1. Innovate
Innovation doesn’t have to be complicated. A simple solution can be innovative as long as it adequately addresses a real problem.
When Amina Azia Ouro-Agoro learned that women farmers in Togo were losing 35 percent of their crops annually, she set out to turn their wasted produce into a product that would not expire — flour. She found a scalable process to turn cassava, yams, plantains and sweet potatoes into nutritious dietary flours, and she sells them through her company, Minagro Group. Since these are staple crops in Togo, these varieties of flour are also cheaper and more accessible to local shoppers than wheat flour, which is largely imported.
Minagro Group flours are sold in nine regions across Togo and exported to Burkina Faso, Senegal and the United Kingdom. The company hopes to hit grocery shelves in the United States soon.
2. Set standards
Every country has its own standards for certain products, but in order to succeed on the global market a product has to meet internationally recognized quality standards. Rahama Wright is an American businesswoman who works with women-owned agricultural cooperatives in Ghana to produce shea butter for the international market. She didn’t have much experience with the product when she started her business, Shea Yeleen, but after doing some research she found the Global Shea Alliance, which sets international standards for shea quality.
“I use that as part of the trainings we do with our cooperative members to make sure they meet those standards,” she says. “And we do testing … in Ghana before the product leaves and [in the United States] when the product arrives to make sure it meets those international standards.”
3. Partner up
Businesses grow through partnership. WEConnect wants to grow the number of women-led companies in supply chains by connecting them with one another to do business together.
“A lot of times, that market opportunity isn’t always what people think it is,” says Schettler. “It’s business-to-business. It’s operations services.”
She encourages companies, from single-person startups to Fortune 500s, to look at a portion of their supply chains and deliberately seek out a women-owned business as a partner.
Walmart is a member of WEConnect. The global retailer developed a new partnership model with guidance from USAID to train 678,000 women farmers in agricultural and business skills to prepare them to sell on the international market. Many have since won contracts with the company.
“You need an ecosystem of support for those women, whether you’re working in a country or you’re working into a global value chain,” says Sarah Thorn, Walmart’s Senior Director of Global Government Affairs.
4. Educate
The people working in your supply chain should understand how their role adds value to the final product.
“A lot of time, women sell the raw material, the shea seeds, because they don’t know the value of having the shea butter brought to market,” says Wright.
To correct this, she flew several women from the cooperatives she works with in Ghana to the U.S. to see their end product on the shelf. She thinks this complete understanding of the value chain and their role in it is central to empowering women to climb higher.
“That to me is what’s transformative — changing their perspective and showing them that they’re part of a much bigger supply chain.”
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