By Jeckonia Otieno
While many young women, fresh from college, would sit and wait for a job to come their way, some are high risk takers, opting to instead venture into business and become their own bosses.
Camilla Ochudo falls in this last category.
After completing her diploma in Public Health at Kenyatta University, Camilla took it upon herself to go into retail business and her gamble paid off. She dismissed the idea of staying idle.
Living in the highly populated Mathare North Area 1, she saw a business opportunity in the numbers that reside in the area. Appreciating this potential, she hit the road and never looked back.
"I was jobless and I wanted something that would keep me busy, because to me life was not going to continue as usual after school," reckons Camilla.
To start off, Camilla was faced with a tough situation â identifying where to invest her seed capital. After some market survey, she realised that cereals had a market and this is where she decided to put her money.
"I realised that cereals had a stable market in this populated neighbourhood," she notes.
Product type
Camilla reckons that investment capital was the first hurdle in the business. She says that as a casual labourer, she put aside some little money, which she decided to plough into the retail shop. At that time, she was still staying with her brother whom she says was very helpful when the business started.
Camilla says her initial investment was less than Sh20,000. And when her new venture started making progress, she recalls that a lot of discipline had to be upheld. This, she did, through avoiding spending her profit. She instead ploughed it back into the business to increase her stock.
She started with two sacks of rice, one sack of beans, a quarter sack of green grams and gradually, her business grew from a small outfit to a modern retail shop, which serves the kadogo economy just right. Now locals flock her shop for different basic consumer goods like flour, salt, sugar, cereals and bread among other essential commodities.
