Josephine’s story: Starting a business
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 18 March 2021
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the sprawling Nairobi slum of Kibera in Kenya, a single mother of four struggles to survive lockdown. At the beginning of the pandemic, Josephine was working as a cook, but soon lost her job, and when the BBC's Ed Butler spoke to her a year ago her situation was dire.
In this episode, the second of a short series, the small business Josephine started to help feed her family sees faltering success before life in a pandemic gets more complicated again. Also in the programme, we hear from Kibera radio journalist Henix Obuchunju, reacting at the time to the confusion and suspicion of early lockdown measures in Kenya. And Dr John Nkengasong, head of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, looks back and reflects on how those early measures played out.
Producer: Frey Lindsay
(Image: A woman with a face mask walks past graffiti that promotes social distancing, to curb the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus, in Kibera, Nairobi, on July 15, 2020. Image credit: YASUYOSHI CHIBA/AFP via Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi there, welcome to Business Daily here on the BBC World Service. |
| 0:06.5 | My name is Ed Butler and welcome back to the second episode of Josephine's story. |
| 0:24.8 | Now I'm just rented, I don't know what to do. |
| 0:32.0 | I'm feeling so sad. I'm really just regretting my life. I'm just beginning with God. |
| 0:39.2 | Thanks to public donations, we heard last week how this Kenyan mother of four was planning to start her life again launching her own fruit and vegetable business. |
| 0:43.3 | I've stuck some fruits, some tomatoes. |
| 0:47.3 | The children are fine, are happy, at least they eat. |
| 0:52.8 | But can she make it work? |
| 0:54.8 | What's next for this single mum trying to make her way |
| 0:57.5 | amidst a global pandemic? |
| 0:59.6 | Today, here on Business Daily on the BBC, |
| 1:02.5 | episode two of Josephine Muchilwa sent me 10 months ago last May from her shanty dwelling in Nairobi. |
| 1:36.0 | She's standing in a grey wooden stall, a corrugated iron roof, a bench of fresh produce in front of her. |
| 1:42.2 | Oranges, tomatoes, onions, potatoes. |
| 1:45.0 | There's a woman selecting some of them to buy. |
| 1:47.8 | Josephine's in a mask. |
| 1:49.4 | Her bright red t-shirt reads, change maker. |
| 1:52.8 | She's proud of this new business of hers. |
| 1:55.9 | A single mother of four with little or no prior experience of this type of work. |
| 2:02.5 | She wants to make it on her own. |
| 2:12.1 | So, I was planning if I can get some funds. I can open a course and start selling vegetables, |
| 2:23.5 | onions and tomatoes. I'll buy the tomatoes at 180 shillings per kilogram. Then I'll sell it at 190 shillings. I'll make a profit of 10 shillings per kilogram. Most of my neighbors don't go to the market |
... |
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