Lucia Zulu – Zimbabwe

Tailored my life

“My personal relations have improved significantly. My husband and his family are now coming back to ask for forgiveness and acceptance. I have forgiven them but my friends are discouraging me from taking him back because of the way he mistreated me,” Lucia Zulu.

Lucia Zulu had always been an entrepreneur but had nothing to show for it because there was no remarkable progress as far as the business was concerned. Each time the business generated profits she would spend the money without keeping a capital reserve. Consequently, her business was on and off because, after misusing the funds, she had to go back to square one and borrow capital in order to get back into business. She had no bank account to keep her money safe.

Zulu is a tailor by profession. She saved the money she received as an honorarium for attending the Gender Links (GL) workshops and bought materials and winter school slacks. They sold quickly and with the profits she realised she secured a space where she set up a new business selling cosmetics. To diversify and maximise profits, she also sold bottled water and has formed a group of five women who sing at funerals and are paid for the service. All of this has happened concurrently and has been very exciting for her. Notable changes have happened in her life since her path crossed with GL.

“My personal relations have improved significantly. My husband and his family are now coming back to ask for forgiveness and acceptance. I have forgiven them but my friends are discouraging me from taking him back because of the way he mistreated me,” confides Zulu.

Zulu was dependent on her husband for survival and the situation made her a victim of abuse. She was not aware of the need to calculate profit or loss when in business, since there were no records. There was no consistency whatsoever, she did not keep records of debtors and had to try to remember which led to customer dissatisfaction as she would at times claim money from clients who would had already paid.

The Gender Links entrepreneurship programme came as an answer to the challenges that were being faced by Zulu. To her, it was such an exciting but enlightening training programme which mentored her to be a business woman. She realised that having the determination to do business is not good enough without the relevant business skills.

“I learnt that to remain in business one has to maintain a capital reserve and this should never be used no matter how difficult the circumstances may become. Selling the right product at the right place and time is also another concept I took seriously and applied it in my business. This made a lot of sense to my situation and I also appreciated the importance of record keeping when in business. Everything I had done wrong in the past was corrected,” said Zulu.

Patience Kwenda who is Zulu’s neighbour said that she was impressed by the change that took place. “Lucia Zulu is my neighbour and we lived in the same neighbourhood for a long time. She survived through begging and she was despised in the community. The day she joined Gender Links we started noticing changes in her life. She started a sewing business and we were surprised when we saw a new fridge she had bought being offloaded at her house. Her children are now putting on trendy clothes instead of the rags they used to wear. Lucia is now a changed person and is living an exemplary life,” according to Kwenda.

Zulu pointed out that his husband’s relatives always visit to check on her. She also said that they were very impressed when she bought a fridge for her house. She also shared with them the knowledge she got from the training. “Sewing is my passion and I am working very hard to acquire a heavy duty sewing machine with multiple functions so that I can expand my business. My father told me that I had become a real woman before he passed away in March 2014. My mother-in-law keeps showering me with praise and at times I think that it is far-fetched but I was made to believe that the sky is the limit,” Zulu enthuses.