About Us
WE ALL HAVE A DUTY
Our Story.
Women of Influence started as a saving group back at the university in 2017. The group comprised 14 female university students from different faculties to empower one another.
Money was saved monthly, and every group member was supposed to save Tsh. 5,000. Our goal was to create access to cash quickly if a member needed urgent money to solve an immediate problem. Through the saving system, some members borrowed and managed to pay school fees timely, borrowed capital to start small businesses, and borrowed money to take care of their essential needs. The group generated an income of 10% from each borrower, making it a group profit.
Since the saving group was an empowerment strategy, every member was advised to have an income-generating activity to be in a position to raise their monthly saving. It is safe to say every member in the group became an entrepreneur, and currently, their businesses are running successfully besides their pro.
At the end of our university academic years, the saving group split by distributing the saved money amongst ourselves. Every member moved away with their share.
However, due to the members’ leadership traits, some members decided to take extra steps to continue to use our acquired legal knowledge to empower the less privileged community members, especially women and young girls, by addressing a few burning issues in the community.
It started as a tale when some members of the previous saving group got interested in creating an impact in the community after school.
Advocates Norah Mara and Neema Mbaga started an initiative called JAZA BEGI(Fill the bag). They collected school items from friends and family and distributed them to schools, especially schools with needy students.
On the other side, advocate Doreen Kalugira’s Dissertation supervisor, who is currently a judge of the High court of Tanzania, shared with her a link to the tuwezeshe Akina fellowship and encouraged her to apply for the leadership training a project by FORWARD -UK implemented in Tanzania by Children’s Dignity Forum (CDF).
After attending a one-week leadership training, she was given a fund of Tsh 1,500,000 to implement a social project in her community. The fund enabled her to engage her friend, Advocate Nuru Ibrahim, to implement the project in the previous saving group. They named the project Women of Influence with a motto, “there is no excuse woman know your rights and potential”.
The project aimed to impart legal and entrepreneurship knowledge to women and girls from Ilala municipal, Dar Es Salaam. The project ran for four months. After completing CDF’s project in 2019, we decided to operate as a community organisation for two years. The organisation’s survival was through members’ contributions and performing activities that could be implemented at a zero fund.
Then towards the end of 2021, we decided to register a Non-Governmental Organization with the same as our saving group – Women of Influence with a mission to achieve gender equality through law and entrepreneurship. After all, many founders are lawyers and entrepreneurs—also, members had a desire to create an impact in the community.
It’s, therefore, safe to say Women of Influence’s story is traced back to 2017 from a saving group created. Symbolically our logo speaks our journey; at the back is a woman with a veil who is us back in 2017 in front of her is a community member whose gender status isn’t known. But we presume the person in front of the woman is a man, a child, a woman, or a government leader who this woman is influencing.
The yellow colour is a beautiful sunrise signifying hope for change. Women of influence believe that change is within the community and starts with us, just as it began in 2017.
That’s our story.
