SBS featured in Barron’s
Street Business School was honored to be featured in the Barron’s story, “5 Key Areas Where Philanthropy is Providing a Path for a Better Tomorrow.”
BARRON’S
December 10, 2018
by Abby Schulz and Beckie Strum
To make enough money to feed herself and her baby son, Ruth Baribwa, deserted by her husband, would ask her neighbors in Bulenga, a village west of Uganda’s capital of Kampala, whether she could do their laundry. If she earned the equivalent of just 50 U.S. cents in a day, she and her son would be able to eat. But when she couldn’t find work, “her baby would just cry and cry,” says Devin Hibbard, founder of the U.S. nonprofit Street Business School, which teaches impoverished women in Africa how to start and run a business. “She had no sense there was a future for her or her son.”
Hibbard recalls Baribwa’s story because of what the young woman was able to do once she went through Street Business School’s training. She began by opening a small vegetable stall in her neighborhood, earning about $22 a month—still far below the international standard for extreme poverty of $1.90 per day. But the training helped her realize that she could do better if she became a wholesaler, so she figured out a way to buy vegetables directly from farmers outside of Kampala twice a week. A year later, she boosted her income to $177 a month.