This International Women’s Day, Building Tomorrow is celebrating the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women by highlighting the individuals and initiatives who are keeping the momentum going for gender parity and empowerment.

Two heroes for hope and innovators for improvement in their rural communities are Fellows Program alumnae Edna Kukundakwe and Sharon Violet Nakyazze.

By driving women’s entrepreneurship forward through their social enterprise, Women in Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship (WISE) Academies, Edna and Sharon are empowering rural communities to take the reins on their own economic futures. In doing so, they are contributing to a legacy of strong female entrepreneurship in Uganda, which distinguishes itself as one of the highest performing African countries terms of business ownership by women.

WISE Academies aims to empower women with 21st century business skills so that they can start and run their own enterprises.

As its core, WISE Academies aims to empower women with 21^st century business skills so that they can start and run their own enterprises. By achieving this, the Fellows hope to end teenage pregnancies and early marriages.

“These are village-based academies whereby we target the young girls between the ages of 12-22 who have dropped out of the education system,” Edna explains. “You will realize that when you look at the current education system in Uganda, for every 100 young girls that enroll in P1, only 30 of them are able to complete P7. Statistically, of that 70 who drop out, 30 of them are due to pregnancies and early marriages.” Because almost all of these pregnancies and early marriages occur in rural areas, WISE Academies targets these areas.

Specifically, WISE Academies provides business mentorship services, alongside imparting technical and management skills, so that women who would like to start their own enterprises know how to take the first step. Some of the types of businesses for which there is a big market and with which the girls work are hairdressing, tailoring, and even beadwork.

“We mentor them with things like how they are going to start their own salon, how they are going to run it, and get money out of it, and then we train them in different skills,” Sharon says.

Hairdressing is one of the business types for which there is a big market demand and is thus targeted by WISE Academies.

This guiding hand from business design all the way up to execution and management helps not just to economically empower women, but is intended to be channeled back towards education. Recounting the impetus for starting their social enterprise, Sharon describes a young girl in one of the communities in which she worked whose parents did not have enough money for her to go to secondary school. Without the means to continue her education, the girl just ended up getting pregnant at age 14. “She doesn’t know how to do anything to earn money,” Sharon days, “So we thought that we should come up with something—that we can at least equip them with the skills so that they are able to make their own money to provide for the children or provide for their families, and improve upon their well-being.” By helping these young women to find and create work, the Fellows hope to break that cycle of poverty and disempowerment that allows such stories to occur.

Sharon and Edna have already trained are 27 girls, and have also strived to increase their capacity to help these women by training another 3 trainers and mentors besides themselves.

In the upcoming years, they hope to further empower female entrepreneurs by extending technology back to rural areas—an endeavor which they have already begun. “We realize that these people are in areas where people have little or no knowledge about technology, yet we are in an era where technology rules over everything,” says Edna. WISE Academies aspires to bridge this gap to impact young female entrepreneurs positively through technology while also promoting it as a tool for advocacy.

Building Tomorrow recognizes the strong ideas and bold action of these female Fellows, who are fighting to uplift women and their rural communities. They are champions of change, pioneers of progress, and heroes battling issues far bigger than themselves to improve the world around them. They are Wonderwomen.