You may or may not have seen me tweet and share on Facebook some Team Honk updates.

For those of my lovely friends that don’t know, Team Honk is a fantastic group of bloggers who are raising money for Sports Relief, they are doing a relay from Lands End to John O’Groats. It’s an exciting weekend ’cause the Team Honk baton will be in my home town tomorrow, the 9th! It’s spending the weekend in Manchester, Cheshire and Lancashire and will be transported in many wonderful, dressed up ways by ordinary mums and dads joining in an extraordinary event!

The Team Honk baton being so close coincides with International Women’s Day, which is today 8th March.

Team Honk is about bloggers raising money and awareness for Comic Relief. To celebrate International Women’s Day #iwd2014, Tanya, Annie and Penny are in Tanzania finding out how donations to Sport Relief last year have created female entrepreneurs and #lastingchange for women, their families and communities and beyond – rippling out #lastingchange in Africa.

This morning I received a Digital Postcard from the lovely ladies in Tanzania.

This is Joyce. Through mentoring and training the Gatsby Trust have helped Joyce expand her poultry business from just a few chicks to now having 300.  She has also now built an extension to house another 400 which should be arriving next week.   The training that Joyce has received has enabled her to make her own feed, thereby saving her money, and also to ensure the feed is healthy.   It has also taught her to recognise signs of disease in her chicks to such an extend that she now has a completely healthy clutch.   Other poultry keepers in her area now phone her for advice and training.   The network of women is now in a much more powerful position to broker deals to sell to supermarkets as they can promise supply, which Joyce couldn’t do on her own.   Joyce is supporting her family and is able to pay for her son to attend a boarding school.

Comic Relief has awarded Tanzania Gatsby Trust a grant of £264,959 over three years so they can continue helping women in Tanzania. 

The number of women running small businesses in Tanzania has increased dramatically in the last 20 years; but these women have faced many challenges, for example, harassment, and demand for bribes from police and officials.

They also face challenges as a result of their gender, a culture that sees them primarily as wives and mothers rather than businesswomen, the demands of being primary carer, their lack of influence in decision making at home and beyond. Loans and finance are harder to access as a woman. Lack of education leaves women without essential literacy and numeracy skills they need.

The Gatsby Trust helps 1000 female entrepreneurs by educating both women and their partners about women’s rights and providing support and training, it has been around since 1992.

Why women you may ask! Well, the statistics speak for themselves:

• 70% of the world’s poorest people are women and they own only 1% of the world’s property.
• Nearly 50% of all sexual assaults worldwide are against girls aged 15 years or younger
• Domestic violence is the largest cause of women’s injury and death – leading to more deaths and disability among women aged 15-44 than malaria, war, traffic accidents and cancer.
• The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that female genital mutilation (FGM) has affected as many as 138 million women and girls in Africa, and the numbers continue to rise every year.
• Many women and girls have poor access to education and about two thirds of all illiterate people are women.