My name is Sarah Naigaga, and I serve my community as the district councilor for persons with disabilities (PWDs) in Buikwe Town Council. For a longtime, I watched the women in my constituency especially those living with disabilities or managing vulnerable households struggle to break free from poverty. I noticed a recurring barrier: a deep seated defeatist mindset. Many of them had decent business ideas but social stigma, constant stress and self-doubt kept them trapped in small survival operations.

Everything changed when I became one of the 500 women entrepreneurs across three sub-counties of Buikwe District to enroll in the Women Entrepreneurship Program (WEP). This timely initiative was rolled out by the Uganda Women’s Network(UWONET) in partnership with KBN Helping Hands and Wellness Foundation and funded by the World Bank through the Ministry of Gender,Labour and Social Development(MGLSD) under the GROW Project. During the Program, I went through an intensive module focused on Self-Awareness and Mindset Change, which is one of the six pillars of the WEP curriculum. This training taught us that sustainable business success must start from within. The facilitators showed us that to succeed, we must deeply understand our own thoughts, feelings, behaviors and recognize exactly how they impact our day-today business operations. I learned that when a woman truly understands herself, she can make much sharper commercial decisions, handle stress effectively and lead a resilient enterprise.

This knowledge brought about an immediate personal and professional breakthrough for me.I shifted from a mindset of limitation to one of absolute possibility. By learning to monitor my own emotional and behavioral patterns, I developed the capacity to make calculated business decisions under pressure, I learned to balance my heavy responsibilities as a political leader and an entrepreneur without burning out. I applied these mindset principles directly to my own retail business, which sharpened my financial discipline and allowed me to expand my operations. Seeing how much I had transformed, I knew I could not keep this knowledge to myself. As a public leader, I have used my platform to pass these exact mindset-change and self-awareness principles down to dozens of vulnerable women and individuals living with disabilities across our town council. I have become a vocal ambassador for grassroots economic self-reliance. I now spend my time teaching other women how to break out of dependency mindsets, overcome daily stress and confidently transition from subsistence farming into formal market trading.

From the bottom of my heart, I want to express my deepest gratitude to KBN Helping Hands and Wellness Foundation, the Uganda Women’s Network (UWONET) and the Ministry of Gender, Labor and Social Development for organizing and funding such a powerful, life-changing education program for the women entrepreneurs in Buikwe.This intervention has not just given us business skills; it  has restored our dignity, awakened our potential and laid a permanent foundation for economic wealth in our households. Through my own living testimony and the empowerment of 500 fellow women in Buikwe, I am certain that true economic transformation begins the exact moment a woman changes her mind.