If you were an ambitious and impoverished girl or young woman growing up in Kenya, the odds, over and above your poverty, would be stacked against you. Boys get to go to high school for free while you would have to pay several hundred dollars a year; your father would be allowed to marry you off in exchange for cattle; as a young mother struggling to keep a roof overhead and food on the table, if you were to be caught stealing or were to have an abortion, you could spend years in prison.
Such are the realities in this part of East Africa, says Menlo Park resident Gwen Books, a board member and fundraiser for Palo Alto-based Project Baobab. The five-year-old nonprofit conducts classes for poor but enterprising young Kenyan women to teach them how to plan and start a small business.
“Women have so little going for them in a country that is really run by men,” says Ms. Books in a recent interview with the Almanac. “What we’re trying to do is teach them not to be so demure. Ö It’s kind of become my life’s work. I can’t afford not to work (in Silicon Valley), but I’m wildly passionate about this.”
“As a woman, I know how difficult it is to succeed.”
Ms. Books, 57, began her career as an executive assistant and now occupies a niche she created: she is a concierge for venture capitalists, for whom she handles schedules, vacations and other “lifestyle management” matters.
She grew up in a “very close, loving family” in Ojai, about 80 miles north of Los Angeles, and has lived on the Peninsula for 37 years. “I’ve had a privileged, lucky life, but I can identify with (Kenyan women) not knowing how to start a business,” she says. “Their challenges are daunting by our standards.”
Poverty and AIDS are endemic in Kenya. About 20 million people — 58 percent of the population — live on less than $2 a day, and about 2.6 million are HIV positive, according to World Bank estimates. Among the victims are parents, who can pick up the disease unknowingly if they or their spouses philander or use prostitution to supplement the family income. When they die, their children often go to orphanages, where they may get just one meal a day, Ms. Books says.
She recalls talking with a young mother on a beach where she was gutting and drying fish brought ashore by fishermen. The woman said she agreed to have unprotected sex with one of the fishermen, perhaps to keep her job, Ms. Books says. “I need to feed my children today,” she recalls the woman telling her. “If I get AIDS in two years, at least I can feed my children.”
Project Baobab — named after the all-purpose tree common to equatorial Africa — can change the odds. With about 200 hours of instruction on how to run a business and write a business plan, plus the chance to win a micro-grant of $100, a Kenyan woman can go places, Ms. Books says.
It’s enough to start a roadside fruit-and-vegetable stand, or a little sewing shop to repair used clothing, or a design shop for indigenous jewelry or a one-cow dairy, she says.
Tabitha, a 44-year-old mother of four, won a Baobab grant and started a dairy. The Kenyan woman later greeted her with, “You’ve saved my life,” Ms. Books says. “I’ve never met more grateful, kind people.”
A certain resonance
Africa has worked its magic on Gwen Books. “Once you visit, you come back and you want to do something,” she says. “Something in Africa resonated with me on my first trip.”By habit, she wasn’t looking for tourist spots. “I want layers and layers of culture,” she says. “It’s important to me to know more about the people and to meet the people, if I can.”
Her first encounter came at Cape Flats, a low-income section of Cape Town in South Africa. Her tour guides — three “very edgy” apartheid-era activists who had once been jailed on notorious Robben Island — picked her up at her hotel. “Initially, I was very afraid,” she says, but also respectful.
“I’m not going to take my American brashness and assume that it’s OK to be me,” she adds. “That land is their home.”
She relaxed, she says, once inside a Cape Flats restaurant measuring about 5 feet by 5 feet, with a dirt floor and a roof of corrugated steel. “I was very impressed that they ran a business in these conditions,” she says. “Yet, these people are always happy. They’re always smiling.”
An encounter with three girls in Kenya who made and sold jewelry led her to bring some of it back, sell it, pay the girls what they asked for and donate the rest to Project Baobab.
Back in this country, where she does all her fundraising, Ms. Books does her share of smiling, too, and raised about $5,000 in 2005 and $6,000 so far this year, she says.
“I just want to share my enthusiasm with everyone I know,” she says. It’s a circle of giving. “My clients ask me for donations for their pet projects, their loves,” she says. “I give and they give back.”
Some 65 percent of Baobab’s revenues comes from individual American donors, she says. Even caterers have been cajoled into donating to her fundraising parties. “I’m not afraid to ask anybody for anything,” she says.
Most of Project Baobab’s revenue goes for teacher training and salaries for the three in-country staff, says program founder Gee Gee Williams of Palo Alto.
A recent budget included about $70,000 in spending, said Baobab board member Jack McLaughlin. Institutional donors include the Global Fund for Women, the Nike Foundation in partnership with Washington D.C.-based Technoserve, and the Juniper Networks Foundation Fund, based in Sunnyvale.
The program
“If women are successfully contributing to society, then perhaps the old ways of how women are recognized — subservient and under tutelage — can change,” says Ms. Williams.Her efforts in Kenya appear to have struck a nerve. Each new Project Baobab class is heavily oversubscribed: 125 applicants for 25 available slots, she says.
The Baobab program trains Kenyan teachers and offers elective classes at six schools in or around the capital, Nairobi, plus a program inside Nairobi’s Lan’gata Women’s Prison.
The life-skills part of the curriculum includes classes in gender empowerment, decision making, assertiveness, communication skills and AIDS awareness and prevention.
The entrepreneurial section addresses planning, starting and managing a small local business, including lessons in budgeting, marketing, inventory control, risk management, legal issues and business ethics.
The program awards about 32 competitive $100 micro-grants per year, with four going to each of the six schools and several more going to women imprisoned for nonviolent offenses, Ms. Williams says. To be eligible, applicants must make a presentation before a committee of program and institution officials. The grants go to the business plans with the most potential.
Since its inception in 2001, Baobab has enrolled 500 women and awarded about 170 grants, Ms. Williams says.
Last year, Baobab began assigning Kenyan women to mentor and track the progress of women receiving the grants. The periodic oversight provides support and reminds them of the need to be accountable to the program, says Ms. Williams.
Weighing the risks
Traveling entails risk; traveling to an equatorial country raises the stakes a bit, with threats of food-, water- and insect-borne diseases.The World Factbook, published by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, labels the risk of illness in Kenya as “very high.” The U.S. State Department warns travelers to be wary of terror attacks and violent crime, especially after dark.
For Ms. Books, such risks are manageable. “My life is not a dress rehearsal,” she says. “I’m not going to stay home if I hear somebody’s going to bomb an embassy (and) I have absolutely no fear of getting sick. I’m a very positive person in general. I don’t worry about things.”
That said, she is up-to-date on her shots, travels with a full medical kit, and, most importantly to her, she always carries a flashlight at night.
She says she is never without a Kenyan companion while in Nairobi — a sprawling mega-city of high-rise offices, tree-lined residential neighborhoods and teeming slums of dirt-floored, tin-roofed shacks.
Ms. Books says she loved poring over maps and globes as a child. “I just have an intense curiosity about the world and what’s out there and about other people.”
INFORMATION
To learn more about Project Baobab, go to projectbaobab.org or call 328-9332.
