Kijani Baby cloth diapers l Photo credit: Kijani Baby— Valerie Rogers Muigai began making cloth diapers in Uganda for her own children to save money and avoid the waste of disposables. After she started giving the colorfully designed nappies to friends as baby gifts, a network of customers grew and her hobby turned into a side hustle. Muigai left her development job five years ago to launch Kijani Baby and now has 13 full-time employees, including six tailors.
Kijani is the first investment of a new $500,000 “mini-fund” targeting women entrepreneurs in Ethiopia and Uganda from Renew, an impact investment firm based in Addis Ababa. The deal was delayed when the Ethiopian governmentUp to now, Renew, an Addis Ababa-based impact investment firm, has managed a network of 150 angel investors to coordinate a dozen investments of about $500,000 each into Ethiopian startups.
Renew found that although women entrepreneurs outnumber their male counterparts in Africa, fewer of them were ready to absorb half million dollar checks. “Women have a harder time accessing banking relationships and supplier relationships,” Renew’s Laura Davis told. Davis and her husband Matt, an American couple living in Addis Ababa, founded the firm in 2012. “So we wanted to build an investment structure that works for women and supports them,” she says.male owners.