In this article by
Cheryl Hall;you will get to know an inspiring woman who is promoting peace through business in hostile territories.
Terry Neese could have easily found an environment more conducive to entrepreneurship than Afghanistan or Rwanda.
But she believes her business boot camp, Peace Through Business, isn’t hyperbole. It’s a mission statement. And she sees the 400-plus Afghan and Rwandan women entrepreneurs who’ve gone through the leadership development program as peacekeepers.
That’s because countries with stable economies are more likely to have stronger democracies and are less likely to wage war with each other. And women are at the heart of stable economies, says the 59-year-old founder and CEO of the Institute for Economic Empowerment of Women in Oklahoma City, which runs Peace Through Business.
One of her staunchest supporters, T. Boone Pickens, agrees. “I believe that you build democratic stability in developing economies by helping entrepreneurs get a stable foothold. That’s the bedrock of this program.”
The annual camp that Neese started in 2007 teaches Afghan and Rwandan women business planning, marketing and management skills in conjunction with Northwood University.
This year’s class of 27 entrepreneurs, most of them ages 25 to 35, will graduate next week at an economic summit and luncheon hosted by AT&T Inc. at the George W. Bush Presidential Center.
Then they’ll head home after three weeks in the U.S. bookended by stops in Dallas.
Now in its eighth year, the 13-week program — which starts with 10 weeks of prep work in the two home countries — costs $22,000 per student, entirely funded through private donations.
AT&T, the T. Boone Pickens Foundation and the Dick & Betsy DeVos Family Foundation in Grand Rapids, Mich., got the program off the ground, Neese says. “They saw the vision, understood the importance of building entrepreneurship at a global level and stepped up to the plate immediately.”
It’s easy to be a corporate champion for the program, says Charlene Lake, an AT&T senior vice president who’s been on board from the beginning. “PTB represents so many issues that are important to us as a company: education, gender equality and empowering women in business. We do it here in this country with various initiatives. This is our opportunity to demonstrate it in a global fashion.”
Lake ties the program’s success directly to its founder. “Terry can make a dollar stretch farther than anybody I’ve met. She’s crafted a program that’s producing results.”
Neese made history in 1990 as the first woman nominated by a major political party for lieutenant governor of Oklahoma. She won the Republican primary but lost in the general election to Jack Mildren. “Hard to beat an OU All-American football quarterback,” she quips.
The native of Cookietown, Okla., population 5 — no joke — built a successful personnel services company in Oklahoma City and is a former president of the National Organization of Women Business Owners.
Her boot camp started in late 2006 with a call from the Bush White House. The West Wing wanted a private-sector initiative that would teach women in Afghanistan how to start and sustain businesses. Women there are treated as second-class citizens and can be punished, even killed, for pushing educational and social mores.
Neese spent 10 days in Kabul with then-Undersecretary of State Paula Dobriansky, talking with women about their aspirations. By the time the plane landed back at Andrews Air Force Base, Neese had the name and a blueprint for the boot camp drawn out on paper.
Rwanda, which still suffers from the ravages of genocide 20 years ago, was added to the program in 2008.
Graduate gives back
Manizha Wafeq, a graduate of the first class, teaches the starter course in Afghanistan. The 15 students with the best business plans, class participation and overall attitude get to come to the U.S.
Wafeq, 28, feels she’s making her country safer by paying it forward as a teacher and with her small fashion company that employs 15 women.
“A lot of our insurgency and violence takes place because we have high unemployment in our country,” Wafeq says. “If we create businesses and there is more employment, our people will not get into a tragic act or take money to do something violent.”
As a facilitator, she gets to come to the U.S. every year. Are the business skills and marketing tools here useful to her?
“They are with a little bit of tweaking to the culture,” she says. “In Afghanistan, we can have fashion shows but only with women and without media.”
The three-week program here started with a boot camp led by professors at Northwood University and local businesswomen covering topics including management, marketing and operations.
Ernst & Young led sessions about financial and business planning. AT&T held seminars about how to put technology to work virtually anywhere in the world.
Then each woman headed off to live and work for a week with an American woman business owner in a matched profession.
Their journey ends next week at the Bush Center.
One of the high points of the first week in Dallas was a field trip to Wal-Mart and J.C. Penney, where the women loaded up on things they can’t get in Rwanda and Afghanistan.
This year’s class wants to build an array of businesses, including a dairy animal veterinary clinic, an auto mechanic garage, an emergency medical clinic, a saffron company, a jewelry designer and a Starbucks, Rwanda-style.
Kubra Jafari, 23, who owns a documentary-making company, KJ Productions, was born and raised in an Afghan refugee camp, where she helped support her family by working in fields and weaving carpets. Things are decidedly better for her now that her family is back home.
While studying political science at the American University of Afghanistan, she’s producing documentaries about the positive changes taking place in her country.
“My business is in Afghanistan. Because I’m a woman, it’s a little bit tricky,” she says. “Because I’m young, and I don’t know lots of people, it’s even more tricky.” And yes, the political unrest does cause disruption and safety concerns. “But still life goes on.”
Sonia Ntukanyagwe, 28, owns Shokola Lite Ltd., two Rwandan cafes that sell coffee, food and baked treats while hosting book clubs, art exhibitions, poetry reading, movie nights and other community events.
She loves the personal interaction that she’s getting with the program. “I can go on the Internet and learn about operations. But being able to have personal, one-to-one conversations with these women and learn from them is something I will never get a chance to do again.”
The toughest part of being a businesswoman in Rwanda is finding skilled labor, she says. “A lot of human resources were lost in the genocide. So it’s really hard to find people who know what they’re doing. There is a lot of training that goes on. Slowly and surely, we’ll get there.”
More determined
Neese says she has seen a “progression of aggressiveness” among the participants. “The women are much more determined, much more optimistic.”
Eighty percent of the women who have gone through Peace Through Business are still in business and have created, on average, 22 jobs.
Given new resources, Neese says she would double the program in Afghanistan and Rwanda and then consider Uganda, Nigeria, Mexico, Kenya, India and Morocco, where government agencies have approached her about expanding.
“We would want to look at what the needs of those countries are and where could we do the most good,” she says.
The courage and optimism of the participants inspires the program volunteers at AT&T, Lake says. “Their world is so different from our world. But there’s this bond that develops.
“They may live 8,000 miles away, but we all aspire to the same things: be successful in our careers and live in a peaceful, prosperous community.”
Terry Neese could have easily found an environment more conducive to entrepreneurship than Afghanistan or Rwanda.
But she believes her business boot camp, Peace Through Business, isn’t hyperbole. It’s a mission statement. And she sees the 400-plus Afghan and Rwandan women entrepreneurs who’ve gone through the leadership development program as peacekeepers.
That’s because countries with stable economies are more likely to have stronger democracies and are less likely to wage war with each other. And women are at the heart of stable economies, says the 59-year-old founder and CEO of the Institute for Economic Empowerment of Women in Oklahoma City, which runs Peace Through Business.
One of her staunchest supporters, T. Boone Pickens, agrees. “I believe that you build democratic stability in developing economies by helping entrepreneurs get a stable foothold. That’s the bedrock of this program.”
The annual camp that Neese started in 2007 teaches Afghan and Rwandan women business planning, marketing and management skills in conjunction with Northwood University.
This year’s class of 27 entrepreneurs, most of them ages 25 to 35, will graduate next week at an economic summit and luncheon hosted by AT&T Inc. at the George W. Bush Presidential Center.
Then they’ll head home after three weeks in the U.S. bookended by stops in Dallas.
Now in its eighth year, the 13-week program — which starts with 10 weeks of prep work in the two home countries — costs $22,000 per student, entirely funded through private donations.
AT&T, the T. Boone Pickens Foundation and the Dick & Betsy DeVos Family Foundation in Grand Rapids, Mich., got the program off the ground, Neese says. “They saw the vision, understood the importance of building entrepreneurship at a global level and stepped up to the plate immediately.”
It’s easy to be a corporate champion for the program, says Charlene Lake, an AT&T senior vice president who’s been on board from the beginning. “PTB represents so many issues that are important to us as a company: education, gender equality and empowering women in business. We do it here in this country with various initiatives. This is our opportunity to demonstrate it in a global fashion.”
Lake ties the program’s success directly to its founder. “Terry can make a dollar stretch farther than anybody I’ve met. She’s crafted a program that’s producing results.”
Neese made history in 1990 as the first woman nominated by a major political party for lieutenant governor of Oklahoma. She won the Republican primary but lost in the general election to Jack Mildren. “Hard to beat an OU All-American football quarterback,” she quips.
The native of Cookietown, Okla., population 5 — no joke — built a successful personnel services company in Oklahoma City and is a former president of the National Organization of Women Business Owners.
Her boot camp started in late 2006 with a call from the Bush White House. The West Wing wanted a private-sector initiative that would teach women in Afghanistan how to start and sustain businesses. Women there are treated as second-class citizens and can be punished, even killed, for pushing educational and social mores.
Neese spent 10 days in Kabul with then-Undersecretary of State Paula Dobriansky, talking with women about their aspirations. By the time the plane landed back at Andrews Air Force Base, Neese had the name and a blueprint for the boot camp drawn out on paper.
Rwanda, which still suffers from the ravages of genocide 20 years ago, was added to the program in 2008.
Graduate gives back
Manizha Wafeq, a graduate of the first class, teaches the starter course in Afghanistan. The 15 students with the best business plans, class participation and overall attitude get to come to the U.S.
Wafeq, 28, feels she’s making her country safer by paying it forward as a teacher and with her small fashion company that employs 15 women.
“A lot of our insurgency and violence takes place because we have high unemployment in our country,” Wafeq says. “If we create businesses and there is more employment, our people will not get into a tragic act or take money to do something violent.”
As a facilitator, she gets to come to the U.S. every year. Are the business skills and marketing tools here useful to her?
“They are with a little bit of tweaking to the culture,” she says. “In Afghanistan, we can have fashion shows but only with women and without media.”
The three-week program here started with a boot camp led by professors at Northwood University and local businesswomen covering topics including management, marketing and operations.
Ernst & Young led sessions about financial and business planning. AT&T held seminars about how to put technology to work virtually anywhere in the world.
Then each woman headed off to live and work for a week with an American woman business owner in a matched profession.
Their journey ends next week at the Bush Center.
One of the high points of the first week in Dallas was a field trip to Wal-Mart and J.C. Penney, where the women loaded up on things they can’t get in Rwanda and Afghanistan.
This year’s class wants to build an array of businesses, including a dairy animal veterinary clinic, an auto mechanic garage, an emergency medical clinic, a saffron company, a jewelry designer and a Starbucks, Rwanda-style.
Kubra Jafari, 23, who owns a documentary-making company, KJ Productions, was born and raised in an Afghan refugee camp, where she helped support her family by working in fields and weaving carpets. Things are decidedly better for her now that her family is back home.
While studying political science at the American University of Afghanistan, she’s producing documentaries about the positive changes taking place in her country.
“My business is in Afghanistan. Because I’m a woman, it’s a little bit tricky,” she says. “Because I’m young, and I don’t know lots of people, it’s even more tricky.” And yes, the political unrest does cause disruption and safety concerns. “But still life goes on.”
Sonia Ntukanyagwe, 28, owns Shokola Lite Ltd., two Rwandan cafes that sell coffee, food and baked treats while hosting book clubs, art exhibitions, poetry reading, movie nights and other community events.
She loves the personal interaction that she’s getting with the program. “I can go on the Internet and learn about operations. But being able to have personal, one-to-one conversations with these women and learn from them is something I will never get a chance to do again.”
The toughest part of being a businesswoman in Rwanda is finding skilled labor, she says. “A lot of human resources were lost in the genocide. So it’s really hard to find people who know what they’re doing. There is a lot of training that goes on. Slowly and surely, we’ll get there.”
More determined
Neese says she has seen a “progression of aggressiveness” among the participants. “The women are much more determined, much more optimistic.”
Eighty percent of the women who have gone through Peace Through Business are still in business and have created, on average, 22 jobs.
Given new resources, Neese says she would double the program in Afghanistan and Rwanda and then consider Uganda, Nigeria, Mexico, Kenya, India and Morocco, where government agencies have approached her about expanding.
“We would want to look at what the needs of those countries are and where could we do the most good,” she says.
The courage and optimism of the participants inspires the program volunteers at AT&T, Lake says. “Their world is so different from our world. But there’s this bond that develops.
“They may live 8,000 miles away, but we all aspire to the same things: be successful in our careers and live in a peaceful, prosperous community.”
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