KAMPALA. On the face of it, Dr Ruth Biyinzika Kasolo is living a dream many African women would celebrate.
Watch her at work and it is difficult to miss the intensity with which she approaches the question of women’s economic empowerment. She speaks with the conviction of someone who understands that behind every statistic on women in business is a real woman—often balancing family responsibilities, limited capital, uncertain markets and the daily pressure to keep a business alive.
For Dr Biyinzika, however, the work is not simply about celebrating women for entering business.
It is about asking a harder question: What happens when a woman who has spent years running a survival enterprise is finally given the tools, skills, finance and market access to grow?
That question sits at the heart of Uganda’s Generating Growth Opportunities and Productivity for Women Enterprises (GROW) Project, where Dr Biyinzika serves as project coordinator.
“We want women to think beyond survival businesses and identify enterprises that can grow into sustainable sources of income,” she has said.
The statement captures the difference between being economically active and becoming economically productive.
A woman selling tomatoes by the roadside is economically active.
But a woman who can expand that business, keep proper records, access suitable finance, employ another person, reach larger markets and generate sustained income is building an enterprise.
GROW is designed to help more women make that difficult transition—from survival to scale.
GROW was conceived as a national response to some of the structural barriers preventing Ugandan women-owned businesses from moving beyond micro-enterprises.
The World Bank approved the US$217 million project in 2022, but implementation did not begin that year. The project became effective on January 20, 2023, an important distinction when assessing its implementation timeline.
The Government of Uganda, through the Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development, implements the project in partnership with the Private Sector Foundation Uganda.
Its development objective is to increase women’s access to entrepreneurial services that enable them to move their enterprises from micro to small and from small to medium businesses.
The programme was therefore never designed as simply another credit scheme.
It brings together enterprise-development services, finance, productive infrastructure, skills, business networks and market opportunities.
The World Bank’s approach recognises that women-owned businesses often face several constraints simultaneously, including limited access to finance, inadequate business-development services, gaps in technical and digital skills, weak market linkages and infrastructure challenges.
That design reflects a reality Dr Biyinzika repeatedly emphasises: capital without capability may not produce growth.
Giving an entrepreneur money without giving her the capacity to manage it can simply make a small problem bigger.
The real question is whether finance can become productive capital.
Dr Biyinzika’s professional background helps explain why she approaches GROW as an enterprise-development programme rather than simply a lending operation.
Her work has spanned skills development, governance, private-sector development and women’s economic empowerment, bringing her into contact with institutions that influence how women access markets, finance and economic opportunities.
At GROW, she operates at the intersection of government, financial institutions, development partners and women entrepreneurs.
Her role is consequently less about simply handing women opportunities and more about creating the conditions under which they can use those opportunities productively.
That distinction matters.
For a woman entrepreneur, a loan may buy stock.
Business training can teach her how to manage that stock.
A market linkage can give her customers.
A productive facility can increase her capacity.
And appropriate financial services can provide the next investment.
The ambition is to connect these pieces so that one intervention reinforces another.
The demand for GROW financing has exposed the scale of the financing gap confronting women-owned enterprises.
Parliament reported in March 2025 that six participating banking institutions had been allocated Shs50.1 billion for the first year of the project. The institutions included Centenary Bank, Finance Trust Bank, PostBank Uganda, DFCU Bank, Equity Bank Uganda and Stanbic Bank Uganda.
But Dr Biyinzika has consistently cautioned against treating access to money as the end of the story.
In February 2025, while discussing GROW’s impact in Kampala, she explained that the programme was intended to support women seeking to upgrade from micro to small businesses and from small to medium enterprises, rather than simply financing very small activities with little prospect of expansion.
The distinction is crucial.
GROW is attempting to identify businesses with growth potential and provide the support required to turn that potential into measurable economic value.
In other words, the question is not merely: How many women received money?
It is: What did the money help them build?
The true measure of GROW therefore begins after the money reaches a woman’s hands.
Can she increase production?
Can she acquire machinery?
Can she employ another worker?
Can she enter a larger market?
Can she maintain proper financial records?
Can she repay the facility and eventually graduate into mainstream commercial finance?
These are the questions that will determine whether GROW produces lasting economic transformation.
The Ministry of Gender’s statistics show that by 2024, 24,753 women entrepreneurs had been reached through various GROW services, including community mobilisation, mindset change, sector-specific training and access to finance.
The numbers provide scale.
But the stories behind those numbers provide meaning.
Development is ultimately not experienced in spreadsheets. It is experienced in the life of a woman whose business moves from uncertainty to stability, from stability to expansion and, eventually, from expansion to employment creation.
This is where Dr Biyinzika’s recent engagement with financial institutions becomes particularly significant.
At the closing of the Women’s Market in Kampala on August 29, 2026, she challenged financial institutions to move beyond strategies and commitments and use data to develop products suited to the different realities of women-owned businesses.
Her argument was straightforward: women are not one market.
A small retailer may need short-term working capital.
A manufacturer may need equipment financing.
An established enterprise may require longer-term investment capital to enter new markets.
Treating all these entrepreneurs as though they have identical needs risks producing financial products that look impressive on paper but fail to address the problems businesses actually face.
“Bank of Uganda are telling the leadership that they are data-centric, and by March next year we shall be registered in many of these processes, and we want to talk in figures,” Dr Biyinzika said.
Her call for data changes the conversation.
It asks financial institutions not simply how many women they have served, but which women they have served, with what products, for which businesses and with what results.
That is a more demanding measure of financial inclusion.
The Women’s Market initiative has introduced the Women’s Market Playbook, developed with the Financial Alliance for Women.
The framework encourages financial institutions to understand women as a diverse customer and enterprise market rather than applying a one-size-fits-all model.
The questions are practical:
Who are the women customers?
What businesses do they operate?
What type of finance do they need?
What prevents them from accessing it?
And what happens after they receive financial services?
Dr Biyinzika’s answer is that institutions need reliable data to answer these questions.
The goal is to move from policy statements about supporting women to actual financial products capable of helping women-owned businesses grow.
It is the difference between saying “women matter to our bank” and designing a financial product that proves they do.
At the Kampala event, Dr Biyinzika recognised 55 stakeholders from financial institutions for supporting the women’s market agenda.
Among the institutions recognised were Centenary Bank, Vision Bank, Finance Trust Bank, FINCA, Housing Finance Bank, Opportunity Bank, Ecobank, Citi Bank, Stanbic Bank and UGAFODE.
She also appreciated the support of the Bank of Uganda, the Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development, the Ministry of Finance, Planning and Economic Development and the World Bank.
“I would like to thank the Bank of Uganda for telling the leadership that they are data-centric, and whatever we are doing is because of their support,” she said, while also thanking the ministries and the World Bank for supporting GROW.
She singled out Serena Cavicchi, the World Bank’s Senior Social Development Specialist and Task Team Lead for Uganda’s GROW Project, for her contribution.
“We want to thank the World Bank for the GROW Project, and we’ve always got 100 per cent support from Serena,” Dr Biyinzika said.
The recognition was more than ceremonial.
It underscored the fact that women’s economic empowerment cannot be delivered by government alone.
Government can create policy.
Development partners can provide resources and technical support.
GROW can organise interventions.
But banks and other financial institutions ultimately determine whether women can access financial products that match the businesses they are trying to build.
For many women, however, the barriers extend beyond money.
They may lack formal business records.
They may have limited digital skills.
They may struggle to provide conventional collateral.
They may operate from informal premises.
They may have childcare responsibilities that limit their participation in training.
They may produce quality products but lack reliable access to markets.
This explains why GROW uses a “wrap-around” approach rather than relying solely on loans.
The project combines business-development services, skills, infrastructure and market linkages with finance.
It acknowledges that a woman’s economic life cannot be neatly divided into separate boxes labelled finance, family, skills, markets and infrastructure.
These realities interact.
A lack of digital skills can restrict access to markets.
Poor records can make it difficult to obtain finance.
Limited infrastructure can constrain production.
Weak market access can make a profitable loan difficult to repay.
Solving one constraint while leaving the others untouched may therefore produce only partial results.
The ultimate test will also be whether the programme reaches women beyond Uganda’s major commercial centres.
The rural entrepreneur may be running a viable poultry, agricultural-processing, tailoring or retail business while remaining far from formal financial institutions.
For such a woman, financial inclusion means more than owning a bank account.
It means accessing the right capital at the right time and on terms that allow her business to remain productive.
It means knowing where to obtain technical assistance.
It means having a market for what she produces.
And it means having financial institutions that understand the realities of her business rather than measuring her against assumptions designed for a different kind of customer.
That is why Dr Biyinzika’s insistence on data matters.
If institutions understand where women entrepreneurs are located, what they produce, how much they borrow, what they invest in and what prevents their businesses from growing, they can design better interventions.
Data, in this sense, becomes more than a reporting tool.
It becomes a development instrument.
Dr Biyinzika’s vision extends beyond women entrepreneurs.
At the recent National Curriculum Development Forum, she challenged stakeholders to examine whether Uganda’s education system is producing people capable of creating opportunities rather than simply waiting for them.
Her message connects education to productivity.
A young person needs skills.
An entrepreneur needs skills.
A woman seeking to grow a business needs skills.
And a country seeking transformation needs citizens capable of turning knowledge into production.
This is where her work on curriculum and women’s empowerment converge.
Both ask the same fundamental question:
What can a Ugandan do with the opportunity placed before them?
Education may provide knowledge, but knowledge becomes economically meaningful when it is converted into skills, innovation, enterprise and production.
That is the bridge between learning and livelihood.
For Dr Biyinzika, the answer is also tied to citizenship.
She has called for a renewal of patriotism among Ugandans, arguing that development requires citizens who see their skills and enterprises as instruments for contributing to the country.
“We need to re-ignite patriotism among our people,” she said at the curriculum forum.
The statement gives economic empowerment a wider meaning.
A woman who grows her business and employs another person creates an opportunity.
A business that buys from local farmers strengthens a value chain.
An enterprise that formalises and pays taxes contributes to public revenue.
A graduate who creates an enterprise instead of waiting indefinitely for employment contributes to productivity.
In this sense, empowerment is not simply about what Government gives women.
It is about what women can build with what they receive.
That is where the language of empowerment meets the language of national development.
Dr Biyinzika’s most recent message to financial institutions therefore provides perhaps the clearest benchmark for GROW’s next phase.
“We want to talk in figures,” she said.
Those figures should eventually reveal whether women are receiving appropriate financing, whether businesses are expanding, whether incomes are rising and whether enterprises are creating employment.
The question must move from access to impact.
From the number of women reached to the number of businesses transformed.
From the amount of money disbursed to the value created.
From the number of loans issued to the number of enterprises that survive, grow and employ others.
From participation to productivity.
From intervention to measurable transformation.
That is where GROW’s real report card will eventually be written.
Ugandan women have never waited for perfect conditions before trying to earn a living.
They have built businesses from markets, homes, farms, workshops and roadside stalls.
They have turned modest capital into household income and, in many cases, household income into businesses that support entire families.
GROW’s challenge is to help some of those enterprises cross the difficult bridge from survival to scale.
That means capital that is appropriate.
Skills that are practical.
Markets that are accessible.
Infrastructure that works.
Financial institutions that understand women customers.
And data that shows what is actually changing.
Dr Biyinzika’s vision brings these elements into one picture.
At the beginning is the woman with an idea or an existing business.
In the middle is the support system—finance, skills, markets, infrastructure and institutions.
At the other end is the outcome: a stronger enterprise, higher income, employment and greater economic resilience.
That is why the story of GROW cannot end with a loan.
Its success will be found in the woman who moves from a small stall to a shop; from a shop to a company; from working alone to employing others; from surviving from one day to the next to planning for the next generation.
And perhaps this is the deepest meaning of Dr Biyinzika’s call to women to “think beyond survival businesses.”
She is asking them not merely to enter Uganda’s economy, but to help shape it.
For when a woman’s enterprise grows, the impact does not stop at her doorstep.
It travels through her employees, suppliers, customers, family and community.
One enterprise can create several livelihoods.
Several livelihoods can strengthen a household.
Stronger households can strengthen communities.
And stronger communities contribute to a more productive economy.
That is when a women’s empowerment programme stops being merely a project.
It becomes an economic story.
And that is the story GROW is now being asked to write.
The post From survival to scale: How Dr Ruth Biyinzika is turning Uganda’s women entrepreneurs into engines of growth appeared first on Watchdog Uganda.
