Yeshi

Yeshi, a participant from Ethiopia, started her shop for dairy products two years before the training. She sold dairy products and served her customers on the little veranda whenever they wanted to enjoy her products right away. She has 4 employees. During the training she realized that she had been very passive and reactive for the last two years. Instead of renting out the room next-door to another person, she could use the room to serve the customers who needed to squeeze on her tiny veranda so far. The training opened her eyes and she suddenly understood that she had to become active herself and change something in order to increase her business success.

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Even before the training was completed, she started to paint the room next-door and opened a colorful restaurant. She used chairs and tables from her house and only paid for a new floor. Now her customers can enjoy her dairy products right at the shop and order breakfast and lunch as well. This change already significantly increased her income! Prior to the training, she used to get 1200 ETB rent from the tenant – now she already makes an additional profit of 100 ETB per day. This adds up to around 3000 ETB per month. The new restaurant is also a solution for the difficulties she faced at fasting days and during fasting periods when customers were not allowed to eat any dairy products. Now, she is able to prepare fasting food for these customers.

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The training has activated her – without the training, she would not have implemented the change, Yeshi says! Additionally, the training helped her to carefully develop her plan step-by-step before putting it into practice. For the future, Yeshi plans to produce dairy products on her own since she has always been interested in agricultural activities. But more importantly, this will allow her to be independent from suppliers in her area. Although she had started this plan many months before, she had not done anything because she was afraid that she couldn’t make it. The training pushed her to pursue her plan – she already bought a piece of land and started negotiations regarding the cows. Due to the training, Yeshi says, she is not afraid any more.