Precious Nyarambi exemplifies entrepreneurial excellence, seamlessly blending her roles in both the profit and non-profit sectors with a deep-rooted passion for social upliftment. Her ventures cut across crucial areas from healthcare to community empowerment in Sub-Saharan Africa. Leading with experience in business planning and event management, Precious’s initiatives like Vessels of Virtue, alongside publishing efforts and speaking engagements, showcase her commitment to fostering growth and resilience among emerging entrepreneurs in the SADC region. Precious recently participated in the WTO-ITC event in Abu Dhabi, dedicated to the role of women in trade.
Precious, you are a well-established entrepreneur and author with activities ranging from cleaning to healthcare and much more! Can you share your entrepreneurial path with us?
I have failed and won and some of my lessons includes Failures are a Blessing in Disguise. Many people spend most of their lives afraid of failure, failure is success turned inside out. One cannot succeed without having failed. It’s hard to see failures for the blessings that they might be. That’s part of the reason why we have such a hard time forgiving ourselves for failures. But failures are a blessing in disguise. While you might not feel that way when you’re going through the failure and are in the thick of things, so to speak, they help to serve you in the long run. When you fail, your attitude changes, something is altered within you. Failure makes one grow spiritually, you realize that you are not wise in your own eyes, you need to depend on something higher and bigger than you. Failure teaches you humility, in fact the reality of failing will humble you. You will be amazed at the amount of strength you possess to get up and try again. You realize your disappointments and analyse them. You might fall many times but through teaching, correction, and encouragement you learn to balance yourself and try again. Failure builds your confidence, when you hit rock bottom, something you feared the most, what is there to lose after that. You learn to build confidence in yourself when you pick yourself up, analyse the situation and do what needs to be done to save your sanity.
Failure teaches you to live in the moment, you can’t be anxious about anything after failing. When you stop or pause, you begin to appreciate each moment. When you fail, you are exposed and vulnerable, you then become open to bigger and better things. The stretch allows new growth levels beyond failure. Your become wiser and more knowledgeable, you become more understanding and accommodating.
What can you tell us about your Vessels of Virtue initiative which seeks to empower other entrepreneurs?
Our Capability Statement: VOV is inspiring women and the youth in Sub Saharan Africa towards achievement of needs that grossly affect them physically, spiritually, and financially. Our transformative empowerment agenda targets both urban as well as marginalised populations. Together with our partner organisations i.e. Econet Wireless, IDC South Africa, and Microsoft, have successfully impacted over 5,000 women and youth through training, empowerment boot camps and employment. In Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Kenya. We have offered women training, coaching and mentorship in various short areas such as counselling, emotional support, office administration, and entrepreneurship, which have impacted communities in these countries.
Our Pillars and Work
VoV is focused on five key pillars:
Education & Economic Empowerment: We will target business entrepreneurship that enhance basic education for competency-based knowledge, skills and attitudes through rural STEM, increased retention of school-going children in arid and semi-arid areas of Kenya by implementing feeding programs, and strengthening financial protection of parents and/guardians
Nutrition & Social Contribution: We will target challenges emanating from lack of or inadequacy in nutrition entrepreneurship to support women and youth engage in value-adding enterprises and businesses.
Smart Agriculture and Food Security: Our organisation will work with innovators, and social entrepreneurs to enhance value-adding agricultural knowledge, skills, tools and solutions to create food security especially in arid and semi-arid areas.
Health: We will target existing workers’ basic skills in health to re-skill them to adapt and integrate the three VOV pillars to re-engineer them as educational, nutritional, agricultural and food security and health entrepreneurs and investors.
You are passionate about delivering positive change in the healthcare sector in your native Zimbabwe. Could you tell us about your plans to set up a hospital in the country, and the type of support you are seeking? How do you see the potential contribution of solar energy to this endeavour?
Investing in Medical Equipment for Integrated Primary Health Care Services to Serve Women and Youth in Harare and Marondera Provinces. This is a Vessels of Virtue International NGO Initiative.
Background
- Zimbabwe’s Vision 2030 social pillar aims to provide all citizens with equitable, affordable, and quality healthcare.
- Primary health care (PHC) in Zimbabwe has been designated as the backbone and a key driver of universal health coverage (UHC).
- Complementing PHC services with quality medical equipment and integrating the health interventions with other targeted community actions accelerates UHC and SDGs.
- The COVID-19 Pandemic exposed the vulnerability of Zimbabwe’s health system due to a myriad of challenges that include, amongst others:
o Inadequately resourced health facilities
o Inadequate and lack of multi-skilled health workforce to support integrated health services.
o Households lack of financial empowerment to seek and access the health services they need
Problem Statement
- Communities affected by developmental and climate change setbacks.
- Double burden of diseases (communicable and non-communicable diseases), diabetes, renal complications, HIV/AIDS, cancers, reproductive and maternal health, and High blood pressure challenges.
- Households distance to the next H/facility is 8-10 kms.
- Hospital lacks equipment, infrastructure, and staff skills to support the delivery of PHC.
- Low medical diagnostic examination equipment and personnel including inadequate renal and cancer diagnostic capacity.
Our Cost Drivers to Strengthening the Health System
- Conduct feasibility assessment of actual health service needs, equipment and support infrastructure for an integrated Primary Health care service.
- Procure Identified equipment and alignment of infrastructure needed.
- Develop capacity leveraging Health facility structures) for a framework to integrate identified health service needs into PHC supported by VoV equipment.
- Support financial empowerment of women and youth through training on entrepreneurship to increase demand for service uptake.
As an entrepreneur who is working across a number of African borders, how do you see the position of women in trade, which was the subject of a recent WTO-ITC High Level Event which you attended in Abu Dhabi, UAE. What were some of your key takeaways from this event?
Increasing women’s participation in the labour market and trade could increase countries’ productivity and trade opportunities, leading to greater economic diversification, innovation, and poverty reduction. Trade also opens doors to education, training, employment and helps women to acquire skills and knowledge they need to succeed in the global marketplace. It was an absolute honour to participate and learn from other women leading in different sectors and spheres. Such great initiatives that are causing huge growth strategies. I am more passionate about implementing after we have learned, exposed and networked.
What would be your advice to other budding women entrepreneurs in Africa who have an idea to make a real difference in their community?
Nothing in Life That’s Worthwhile Will Come Easy
One of the biggest root problems we have with failure, is that, oftentimes, we set ourselves up for our own demise. Why? We think that success at something should be easy. We’re used to instant gratification. The very fact that we have on-demand everything is woven into the very fabric of our society today. We don’t want to wait. Why should we?
But nothing in life that’s worthwhile will ever come easy. There’s a reason why monumental achievements are hard. If they were easy, everyone would be sitting pretty. We would all be rich, happy, healthy, and wise. However, that’s not the case. Big goals take big sacrifices. When we realize just how much we must give up achieving something big, most of us turn back.
The truth? We’re not willing to always put in the work for something monumental. We’re not always willing to give something all that we’ve got, risk it all, and put everything on the line. When we refuse to back down, even when we fall, that’s when incredible things begin to happen. And that can only come in the face of multiple failures.
You can forgive yourself for failure when you realize that, if you truly want something — and I mean truly and utterly right down to your very core — then you need to fail and do so many times. If you don’t give up, you don’t fail. Thomas Edison once said that “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.” Keep at it, keep going.
