By CAROLYN  MUTEMWA –
SYLVA Catering targets to train 80,000 women farmers in Zambia, Mozambique and Tanzania on how to preserve local food stuff.
Sylva Catering executive director Sylvia Banda said  that the training would assist rural women to sustain themselves and their families from being hit by starvation all year round.
Ms Banda said in an interview in Lusaka that to-date, her company had managed to train 20,733 women from the three countries.
“We want to train 80,000 women on how to preserve local food stuffs for future use. This exercise started in 2005 and it has moved so fast after we received a matching grant from the World Bank.
“This is because we were able to mount our own trainings. In the next 15 years, we are capable of training 59,267 farmers in order to bring the total number of women to 80, 000,” Ms. Banda said.
However, Ms Banda has observed that most rural women cannot take productivity to another level because they are hindered by resources.
She has encouraged women to identify some Non-Governmental Organisation (NGOs) that can help them find market for their products.
She advised women in entrepreneurship to get loans for their businesses and not just wait for free handouts.
Once these loans were accessed, women would be forced to work extra hard so as to find means of paying back and in the process, they would be earning a living.
And Ms Banda who is an entrepreneur herself has advised women in businesses to avoid copying ways of doing businesses from one another and urged them to come up with their own way of doing things so as to show creativity.