Fueling Community-based women businesses in rural, semi-rural and semi-urban areas
In the heart of many rural, semi-rural and semi-urban communities, you’ll find women at the forefront, running smallholder farms, managing kiosks, operating salons, selling crafts and offering essential local services. These businesses are the backbone of their communities, yet despite of their resilience, many struggle to grow, scale, or even survive beyond their fifth year. The missing link? Structured ideation.
Ideation, the process of generating, refining and validating business ideas is often overlooked in grassroots business development. And yet, it’s one of the most critical foundations for building resilient and scalable enterprises. Here’s why:
- Women have deep knowledge of their environments and community needs. Ideation helps them translate this knowledge into starting and growing demand-driven products and services.
- When women are actively engaged through the right ideation curriculum, they move from being passive recipients of support to confident problem-solvers who own their entrepreneurial journey.
- Through ideation, women explore multiple solutions, test assumptions and develop business models that can evolve with changing realities.
- With limited access to capital, ideation encourages women to think creatively about how to leverage local materials, networks and skills to generate value efficiently.
- Ideation workshops become powerful spaces for connection, collaboration and knowledge exchange, sparking the formation of SACCOs, cooperatives and shared ventures that boost market power and visibility.
At Mkazipreneur, we’ve seen firsthand how embedding ideation into our community engagement programs transforms survival businesses into scalable ventures. When women are supported to think, test and build from the ground up, they’re not just starting businesses, they’re building legacies.
It’s time we make ideation a non-negotiable step in every rural, semi-rural and semi-urban business support program. Let’s invest in the thinking behind the doing.
