From Not Having Food to Making Ksh 12,000 a Day
- Melissa Onguti
- Jul 24
- 4 min read
Updated: Jul 27
Anne had a business before Fanikisha.
She was already out there; selling sugarcane juice, making tea and chapatis, hawking, hustling, showing up every day in the particular way that Kenyan women show up when there is no alternative.
She had a husband. Seven children. A stall. A daily routine built around keeping all of it alive.
And then COVID came.
I went from not having food to making Ksh 12,000 a day.
The stall did not change. The street did not change. The products did not change.
What changed was how Anne ran the business.
The Business That Was Already There
Anne arrived at Fanikisha with a business.
She had already built it. She was already working it. She already knew her customers, knew her products, knew the rhythm of the street she traded on. What she did not know, what no one had ever shown her, was how to make the business work for her instead of just through her.
Money came in. Money went out. At the end of the day there was not always enough to know whether she had made a profit or simply survived another one.
During COVID, the survival became impossible. The customers disappeared. The income dried up. A woman with seven children and a husband looked at her kitchen and found it empty.
She kept going anyway. Because that is what you do when there is no other option.
What Fanikisha Taught Her
When Anne joined Fanikisha: Kianda Foundation's women's economic empowerment program, she was not a blank slate waiting to be filled. She was an experienced businesswoman waiting to be equipped.
The program gave her the language for what she had been doing wrong.
Credit.
This is the moment Anne describes in her own words:
I expected those who buy on credit to come back and buy more with money. But they just disappear without even paying.
Every trader in Kenya knows this story. The customer who promises to pay next week. The regular who runs a tab that never closes. The neighbour who buys on trust and tests it. Anne had been absorbing these losses for years without understanding the full weight of what they cost her.
Fanikisha showed her.
She stopped selling on credit. She separated what the business earned from what the family spent. She learned to look at her margins clearly, not to see how little she had, but to see exactly what she had and how to make it grow.
Ksh 12,000 a day is what happened next.
Sugarcane juice. Tea. Chapatis. The same products. The same stall. A woman who now knows exactly what her business is worth and charges accordingly.
The Marriage That Made It Possible
Anne will tell you that her business did not grow alone.
By the time you are married and have seven children with someone, you have to have chosen them.
She chose her husband. He chose her. And in that choosing, sustained through the years and the children and COVID and the empty kitchen and the slow rebuilding, they became a team.
She also asked God, at their wedding, to help them grow old together.
That prayer and that partnership are not separate from the business. They are the infrastructure on which the business stands. A woman who feels secure at home builds differently than one who is carrying the weight of an unsupported marriage alongside everything else.
Anne's Ksh 12,000 day is not just a business story.
It is a family story. A faith story. A story about what becomes possible when a woman has the right support, from a program, from a husband and the right tools.
What Her Children Are Watching
Seven children watched their mother during COVID.
They watched her go to the stall anyway. Watched her come home with less than enough. Watched her keep choosing the stall, the chapatis, the sugarcane press, the thermos of tea, because giving up was not a language she spoke.
Now they watch her make Ksh 12,000 in a day.
They are watching the same woman. What they are seeing is completely different.
That is the Fanikisha multiplier playing out in real time; not in a report, not in a data set, but in the way seven children understand what their mother is capable of, and therefore what they might be capable of too.
The One Thing That Changed
Anne had a business before Fanikisha.
She has a thriving business after it.
The difference is knowledge. Specifically: knowing that the customers who buy on credit and disappear are not loyal customers, they are a leak in the business. Knowing that the money coming in must be separated from the money going out. Knowing what the stall is actually earning when you count it properly.
That knowledge, applied to an already-existing business, by an already-capable woman, turned a struggling stall into Ksh 12,000 a day.
If you are running a small business in Kenya right now. If you are mixing your business money with your household money. If you are selling on credit and watching customers disappear. If you are working as hard as you have ever worked and still not seeing it in the numbers at the end of the day,
Anne's story is for you.
And Fanikisha is for you too.
Fanikisha is Kianda Foundation's women's economic empowerment program, running since 2003 across Kenya.
If you know a woman who is ready — tell her.
Want to make it possible for more women like Anne to access Fanikisha?
→ Support the program: Donate
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