Martha’s Story Want to help Egyptians like Martha?

When we first met Martha, she was struggling to sustain her porcelain sculpture business from her home in the Upper Egypt province of Minya. She was chosen to attend the YEP female craft makers training program in the U.S., which proved to be a huge turning point in her career. Martha returned home with new business knowledge, and a greater ambition to pursue her business ideas.

Her experience in YEP led her to seek further training and gave her the skills and knowledge to win the Goldman Sachs $10,000 Women Entrepreneurship and Leadership Program, conducted with American University in Cairo and the University of Pennsylvania. With this award she was able to study marketing, business administration, and accounting at the American University in Cairo. She says that the scholarship to attend University and the YEP trainings gave her the skills necessary to build her business.  

Martha began implementing her training first by renting a place to manufacture her porcelain products. Her marketing training allowed her to reach her target audience for her products, and people began to recognize her work and the demand for her products drastically increased. Her projects became so successful that she needed to expand her business by renting a larger workshop, hiring 6 more employees, and manufacturing a wider range of products. With her business expanding, Martha continued to attend every single training session that was offered by the YEP program, always interested to learn more and to participate in the discussions with the trainers.  

With her experience from the YEP trainings, Martha began to receive requests to lead training courses for women and young people on opening a small business and on porcelain production. Her training courses were very popular, and she began to build a group of other teachers that could help her lead the classes. She recently was inspired to create a Youtube channel to teach porcelain making in the hopes of reaching a larger audience.

Martha dreams to eventually transfer her workshop into a bigger center that creates different products and crafts, but overall she just wants to help young men and women start their own small businesses.