Entrepreneurial hope is rising like a phoenix in Afghanistan. Forging success from rubble, a group of aggressive, resilient, and demanding women insist on dreaming big.
I spoke with Terry Neese, the powerhouse behind Women Impact Public Policy (WIPP) Institute, Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to the economic empowerment of women. As CEO, president and co-founder of WIPP Institute, Neese has brought nine Afghan women to the United States for a mini-MBA program at Northwood University in Midland, Michigan.
To soak in entrepreneurial education, the women have left their countries for five weeks—many of them have husbands and children at home, and all of them have had to find someone to run their businesses in their absence. They will travel to Washington, DC for meetings at the State Department, Department of Education, the Small Business Administration, and the Labor Department.
The women will disperse for another week to live with American women who own businesses that are similar to the kinds of businesses they run in Afghanistan. And when they return to their country, they’ll be equipped with a brand new business plan and a brand new laptop computer, courtesy of KeyBank, GE and Northwood University.
Neese, whose bipartisan plug-ins to Washington, DC run deep, traveled to Afghanistan in July. The devastation she witnessed there made it hard for her to process the success and stamina of the 118 Afghan entrepreneurs who applied to her program.
“We had bodyguards, and I wore a forty-pound flak jacket,” she said. “It was unnerving to be driven down the street and to see all of the devastation and destruction. I’m sure they’d done a lot of work on reconstruction, but I have to say, I felt like they’d just been bombed yesterday.”
Neese has been recognized by Fortune magazine as one of the Power 30—the most influential small businesspersons in Washington, DC—and by Inc. magazine as one of four Power Brokers and Activists for small business inside the beltway. And in 1990, she became the first female nominated by a major political party for lieutenant governor of Oklahoma.
