Meet Markey Culver | Business Woman

We had the good fortune of connecting with Markey Culver and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Markey, every day, we know how much execution matters, but we think ideas matter as well. How did you come up with the idea for your business?
I was assigned to a rural Rwandan village in the US Peace Corps. And, in most rural Rwandan villages, people eat one meal a day. So, in the name of solidarity, I did too for the first year. Until I realized: “Wait a minute. I’m super hungry!”

I started working with a group of women to make salads for lunch with the available vegetables. Then one day, I baked a simple loaf of bread. Bread is a known commodity in Rwanda, but scarce in the villages. The women wanted to learn how to bake bread, so I began teaching them how to prepare it themselves. The women loved the bread, but more importantly, I saw what the women did with their bread. Watching them, I had two aha moments:

The first was that the women gave their bread to their children. I thought “aha, this could be a way to address hunger and malnutrition.” I began creating new recipes, fortifying more breads with local protein and micronutrients, teaching the women how to do the same. My goal was simple: food. Teaching the women a skill that would help provide a nutritious snack at home for their children. But, after a few weeks of baking, these women informed me that they’d just successfully sold their fortified bread in the nearby market. They sold their bread! These industrious women had created a market for their breads, meeting local demand with local supply.

That’s when I realized that something as simple as a loaf of bread had the power to create jobs for the women, improve community access to nutrition, and spark local economic growth. And the seeds for The Women’s Bakery were sewn.

The Women’s Bakery is a social enterprise that empowers women through vocational training, employment, and social programming, and we build bakeries that sell excellent breads to Rwandan communities. Our major key is women’s social and economic empowerment, and our minor key is our One Bread Project (OBP), a school snack program that serves primary school students a daily piece of fortified bread, meeting the World Food Programme nutrition fortification standards. We launched OPB in 2019, serving ~400 children a day; today, we serve 20,000+ children every day.

Alright, so for those in our community who might not be familiar with your business, can you tell us more?
The Women’s Bakery is a social enterprise, a hybrid non profit parent company based in the US that wholly owns a for profit subsidiary in Rwanda. This structure allows us to use business as a tool to achieve high social impact. Being a hybrid means we have a “double bottom line” where we place on equal footing financial return (profit) with positive, lasting social impact. So, while profit is important to us for the longevity of our business model, it is not why we build and operate bakeries, nor what motivates us to create new products and expand our distribution reach into new, and especially more rural communities. We are motivated by our positive social impact, namely recruiting, training and gainfully employing vulnerable women, offering holistic benefits (like onsite daycares), and creating nutritious, affordable breads that we can sell on a sliding scale to communities, particularly rural elementary schools. The eventual profit of our bakeries (no bakery is profitable yet) will allow us to not only maintain our social programming, but expand them.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
When visiting Kigali, the capital city of Rwanda, I recommend staying at Heaven Boutique Hotel, having a sunset dawa cocktail at the rooftop bar of the Ubumwe Hotel, and dining at Sole Luna. A visit to the Genocide Memorial is a must, and I recommend a gorilla trek in Virunga National Park and/or a mini safari in Akagera National Park.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
Our Rwanda-based team, especially the women bakers, and our global community of donors. I was in Rwanda this past May, and I had a moment of reflection walking through our new 14,000+ sqft building: ten years ago, The Women’s Bakery was a brand new organization, barely incorporated, running on hope and a dream – literally. Our “bakery” operated out of a small house on the outskirts of Kigali; we baked in a crudely constructed tin oven, barely bigger than a typical home oven, or in open charcoal stoves. Women bakers were kneading dough by hand and selling bread on foot. A good day in 2015 meant selling 2 loaves of bread and 48 buns.

Today, in our warehouse-like building, outfitted with commercial equipment that mixes, kneads, shapes and bakes bread, women bakers pump out 700 kilos of dough a day, translating roughly, into 25,000 buns, hundreds of loaves of bread, and even a few specialty items, like cinnamon rolls, all distributed and sold daily within Kigali and surrounding communities. Women bakers seamlessly use our commercial equipment, and got a kick out of explaining to me what the new equipment does and teaching me how to use it.

Ten years ago, I couldn’t have imagined where we’d be today. We have come so far and none of this would be possible without our dedicated, hardworking team and our steadfast community of supporters – thank you!

Website: https://womensbakery.com

Instagram: @womensbakery

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-women’s-bakery/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/womensbakery/

Image Credits
The bakery pictures are from our new Flagship bakery location in Kigali, Rwanda.