São Paulo – With new ideas and a desire for their businesses to work out, a Brazilian and a Jordanian have reached the final of the “Empretec Women in Business Award”, whose winner will be recognized in Doha, Qatar, in April 2012, during the 13th United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad). The Empretec is a training and motivation program promoted by the Unctad to encourage entrepreneurship in developing nations. The award also includes finalists from Ecuador, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Panama, Uganda, Vietnam and Zimbabwe.
Patrícia Giordani established company Moura e Paz Soluções Ambientais in 2009, due to an uncomfortable situation she herself lived and managed to transform into a business opportunity. A dentist who had been working for 20 years, in 2007 she was fined by the sanitary inspection department for not disposing correctly of residues from her office. The fine, however, was not just for her, but to the entire dentistry, medical and veterinary class in her city, Vilhena, in the state of Rondônia.
“That generated controversy,” said Patrícia, who started searching for an appropriate destination for the residues of her work and could not find a company to work with it in the whole of the state of Rondônia. “I am going to set up a company for that, I thought. As there is none in our state”, she said. Thus, she decided to create her own business. Before that, she studied what residues the company would deal with. She graduated in Management, Auditing and Environmental Inspection and sought new technologies, like a machine to burn residues and cleanse the smoke, releasing only treated gasses.
However, the beginning was not easy. She faced the resistance of former colleagues and of other professionals who had also been fined. Despite starting without any clients in the first year of her business, she persisted and won the first clients in the neighbouring state, Mato Grosso. Currently, she supplies over 700 companies in both states, working with hospital, industrial and other residues considered harmful. Her perseverance has already resulted in her winning the Sebrae Businesswoman award, granted by the Brazilian Micro and Small Business Support Service (Sebrae).
Now, with the possibility of seeing her work awarded once again, she points out its importance to the region in which she lives. “There were tonnes of waste, dangerous residues that went to the open air sanitary dump. I am touched to be doing something for the environment. Our work is of public utility,” she said. Among her current clients are renowned names like Toshiba, Votorantim Cimentos and M. Martins. In some of these industries, Patrícia also gives talks about the environment. With an initial investment of 5 million Brazilian reals (US$ 2.8 million), Moura e Paz currently has monthly revenues of around 300,000 reals (US$ 168.6 million).
Chemists
The Jordanina Raghda Kurdi also changed the panorama of her sector of operation, the pharmaceutical. After working in a chemist and for the pharmaceutical industry, she decided to create Pharma Serve, a company that provides services for a series of small chemists in Amman, the Jordanian capital, and surrounding areas.
“We train employees, implement software and work on accounting. We collect insurances and manage the investment of these chemists,” she said. The company was established in 2006 and currently counts on 26 employees who service 70 clients. Apart from the services mentioned, Raghda also buys medications from industries and resells to small chemists for a lower price than they would manage to get individually.
“I was very pleased [with nomination to the award] as in entrepreneurship you take on all the risk of the business,” she said. She added that she also hopes that her being in the final of the Empretec may provide incentives for other women in the Arab world to start their own businesses. “It is very important for women to see what [they too] can do,” she said.
*Translated by Mark Ament
