Women grow up learning various life skills at home, especially taught by their mothers. Nisha Malbul decided to sharpen one of her skills, stitching, that she learnt at home  As she had a stitching machine at home, she started her home-based business with low investment. After a year with the support of her friends she registered her business. It is now running for 6 years and Nisha is happy to be able to support her family financially. Nisha specializes in stitching hand bags and she has been making a variety of hand bags for both women and men.

Disaster Experience 

Nisha started her business after the earthquake, so the incident had no effect on her business. She shares that the current pandemic is beyond one’s wildest nightmares. She had  happily run her business for a couple of years when the pandemic started to spread like a wildfire and people were only thinking about not getting infected. As a consequence, she shut her business for almost a year. She expressed that it was the most difficult phase in her life as she had taken a loan from a cooperative for her business and now there was no business. Nisha believes ‘As they say everything has its expiry and one should always be hopeful of the future’. Although she shut her physical store she resumed her business from her home and has plans to rent out a store again. 

When she came across the opportunity of becoming a project beneficiary, Nisha was excited to learn online as this would be her first ever experience of learning via zoom and promoting her products through Udhyami Utthan (UU) Online Shop at Thulo.Com. 

“Fostering Resilience of Women-Led Businesses (including home-based women producers) and Consumers” is a project being implemented by Thulo.Com and Enterprise for Management, Economic Reform, and Gender Equality (EMERGE). The project is supported by United States Agency for International Development (USAID)’s Tayar Nepal - Improved Disaster Risk Management Project and also contributes to Udhyami Utthan (UU - https://udhyamiutthan.com/about-us/ ), an entrepreneurship empowerment initiative.

Experience as a Project Beneficiary

Nisha had never been an online trainee before. She recalls her kids learning online and being amazed  experiencing the power of technology. Getting to learn to use zoom and participating in online training was a new experience which Nisha rejoiced.

The overall training  modules were completely new for Nisha and she found each session worthwhile to attend. She shares that Costing in Business under the training module ‘Business Development Management’ was an eye opening session. Nisha shares, “Every home based producer requires  this training, as allocating the right price to our product is essential if we want to run a profitable business and most of us are not doing the proper calculation.” After this session Nisha has started keeping records of all her costs to properly price her products.

Nisha had never thought that distributing workload among the team would help during the time of disaster, before working on the Business Continuity Plan (BCP). Though it's a micro level business she would like to still take support from her friends and assign them some responsibilities just in case disaster strikes. 

While technologies are helping to reach a larger market Nisha was not confident about it. She shares, “People talked about online shopping but I never thought it would work for my business. When I participated in digital literacy training and also made my products available at Thulo.Com I realized that if we make sure of basic things like quality of products then we can have a good share of repeat customers.” She continued, “Being associated with UU Online Shop has helped me understand the importance of use of technology  for business during the time of disaster.” 

Nisha expressed that it was good to have knowledge on different loan schemes of the bank. 

Future Plan

Nisha plans to save some money from her profit, keeping in mind to have some financial resources at hand for disaster preparedness. She wishes to continue her association with Udhyami Utthan and Thulo.Com because this gave her an experience that online business is a must if you want to run a business even during a disaster like pandemic.

Nisha Malbul is an owner of Sahayogi Silai Udhyog based in Dhapakhel, Lalitpur

Visit her Online Shop at Thulo.com/uu

https://thulo.com/index.php?dispatch=companies.products&company_id=853