Women’s Development Program: Tea with Ladies

Written by Kathleen Samy

14 Jan 2016

Food. Glorious food! Malaysians love their food. Sweet or savoury, eating is an ever popular past-time with us. Especially with our local festive seasons, there seems no end to the feasting. An interesting development to this local (and global) passion for good food, home-baked cakes and cookies have become a burgeoning cottage industry.

Coincidentally, SSVP has discovered that many of the ladies involved in our Women’s Development Program are very keen to set-up their own business in cooking and baking. This seems a perfect opportunity to nurture the seed within them as budding entrepreneurs.

The Women’s Development Program basically empowers women to achieve their full potential through counseling, seminars, women empowerment programs and networking with other women groups and organizations. These sessions include tips on how to handle relationship issues, the importance of good health, assertiveness skills and communication skills.

As part of the program, ‘Tea with Ladies’ is an ongoing project which started last year in October 2015. The main idea is to empower the women, to move beyond handouts – to open their minds to the possibilities that hard-work and a little creativity can conjure up. We want to encourage the spirit of entrepreneurship in them.

We had an experienced baker come and teach the ladies how to bake cookies and cakes, as well as how to market the goods. These sessions were held at Ozanam Service Centre in Sri Sentosa. The ladies baked London almond cookies, muruku, jam tarts, peanut biscuits and suji biscuits. So far, they’ve sold it during the Deepavali and Christmas season to great success. The marketing itself has been via word of mouth and most orders have come through our conferences and churches. Our Social Development Coordinator, Ms Malini, continued to motivate and counsel the ladies as the project progressed.

The Society advanced the working capital for the project and the profits were then distributed amongst the ladies in an equitable fashion in accordance to the input and output of each lady towards the project. The profits from the Deepavali and Christmas cookies enabled the 8 ladies (a number of single mothers) in the project to purchase clothing for their children, celebrate Deepavali festivities joyously with their children and for school start-up expenses (uniforms, books and bus fares).

It is important to realise that the skills learned are invaluable. They are discovering the importance of offering good quality products, marketing and communication skills, calculating the budget – cost and pricing, distribution and how to follow-up for further orders. These are entrepreneurship skills that are applicable with any product.

Coupled along with the many other programs available at the centre (English Language classes, computer skills, personality development etc), they are growing and learning to become independent women of their own right.