Many don’t have a formal education or business literacy but they support their families and create opportunities for others.
in Hout Bay. Like them, she grew up in a township and has experience with the problems, strengths and advantages of their position.
Personal experience: Ishara Maharaj is doing her doctorate on entrepreneurial women in townships such as Philippi. . Photo: David Harrison Theirs is a path fraught with all the vulnerabilities faced by both business owners and black women in township life, including poverty, crime, fragile to no support system, hunger and social distress. But the women township entrepreneurs, whose lives Maharaj is exploring for her PhD in women’s entrepreneurship at the University of Cape Town, are not beaten. Through her research, she aims to give voice to millions of women from low-income areas.
During the Covid-19 lockdown of 2020, one woman, who had been running a tour-guiding business in the township, found her enterprise falling flat. Nobody would take township tours and all her “Airbnb experiences” fell by the wayside. “The entrepreneurial drive keeps going and finds new ways to make money,” Maharaj says. “They don’t just involve themselves in their own business; they are hiring unemployed youth. One woman was selling clothes from her house, but she also trained to be a coffee barista. During lockdown she opened a coffee shop and hired and trained youth to run it with her.”
In going out to raise funds for her start-up, Maharaj found herself confronting biases about the fact that she was a single woman of colour. Research into entrepreneurship internationally revealed the same trend: male investors might consider funding female founders if they are partnered with a male, but not on their own. Maharaj is on a mission to create a more supportive policy and programme environment for them.
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