Alumni Profile: Entrepreneurship in East Africa
Laura Richards, MBA 18, saw many in the social sector lacked business skills, so she founded an entrepreneurship program for women in East Africa.
By Patricio Cantú
When Laura Richards graduated from college with an undergraduate degree in psychology in 2012, she was idealistic and eager to begin her career.
But after several years as a counselor and program supervisor for social service agencies, Richards was disillusioned. She applied to UT for graduate school because she felt that nonprofit organizations often used inadequate business models. She wanted to learn how to do the work she loved in a smarter way.
“Many nonprofits are not really well run,” Richards says. “They don’t market themselves well and they don’t budget to scale, and there’s not a lot of financial literacy that goes through the management teams. At McCombs, I was able to learn the skills that I saw lacking in the social sector.”
While she was an MBA/Global Public Policy student at UT, Richards founded Business Innovations for Good, a multidisciplinary entrepreneurship program for women in East Africa. The program includes training in financial management, design thinking, digital marketing, ecosystems, and sustainability, and also provides tailored mentor sessions.
An international internship at an NGO called the Women of Uganda Network while she was a graduate student sparked the idea. She was determined to return to the East African nation.
Richards started “bootstrapping” her African entrepreneurship initiative while completing her studies at the McCombs and LBJ schools, tailoring her degree programs to focus on social entrepreneurship.
Her aim for the organization is to expand the job market for the region in an ecologically sustainable manner. Her goal is to create 5,000 new jobs in the agriculture business sector by 2028.
“We want to help people not just to develop the capacity of their businesses to create jobs in their communities, but to do it in an environmentally conscious way, so that they’re having a net positive impact on their surrounding environment,” Richards says.
This article appeared in the fall issue of McCombs magazine. Click on the link to see the full issue.
