Nokia has lost an asset to shoe racks and wardrobes across Nigeria. In 2014, after working the customary hours of 9am – 5pm at the multinational communications and IT company, Idongesit Harrison would resume at another duty post – this one, hers – a footwear production space where she created by hand and machine: shoes, slippers, accessories for men, women and children.

The side career in shoe manufacturing had been a long time in coming, started in 2005 by an inclination to recreate a pair of slippers her mother had bought. She then trained with a cobbler for a few weeks, thereafter deciding that she could make higher quality and more original goods from what she had learnt. She did.

In 2014, she quit her job with Nokia. In the same year, she won a business ideas competition and was awarded a N2 million Naira grant and free training at Nigeria’s best executive business education facility – Pan Atlantic University.

In two years, with all her hours now hers to put into her shoe production company, Idong Harrie Limited, she grew her business to the point where it was ready to expand. She had always however had a confidence deficit when it came to accessing loans, seeking and trusting investment, capital. Her books were also not out of the reddespite her high inflow of revenue. She turned to the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women’s Road to Women’s Business Growth initiative, ‘designed to empower women entrepreneurs grow their enterprises through financial and business skills training.’

Founded in 2008 by Cherie Blair, a British barrister, lecturer and wife of the former Prime Minister of Great Britain, Tony Blair, the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women is a charity that seeks to help women like Harrison in emerging markets all over the world strengthen their capability, confidence and access to capital where they lack equal opportunities. Its work has been cut out in Nigeria since it started operations four years ago.

According to the 2015 World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Report, which covers amongst others, economic participation and opportunity, Nigeria ranks 125th out of 145 major and emerging economies measured. According to Cherie Blair and Sevi Simavi, C.E.O. of the Foundation, with regard to financial inclusion for women, Nigeria has one of the biggest gender gapsin Sub-Saharan Africa with women earning 23% less than their male counterparts and only 34% of women having access to bank accounts compared to 54% of men.

The Foundation’s attempts to contribute to close this gap in Nigeria started out modestly, albeit employing an increasingly familiar tool to solve global problems – technology. The Foundation launched an SMS-based learning resource titled ‘Business Women’ that delivered key business tips and hints to about 70,000 women owners of small and micro businesses.

It was during this project the Foundation came to realise that there were bigger problems to be addressed. “We found that women with medium to large businesses also needed support – accessing capital and building more hardcore business skills to drive growth in the economy; women who are job creators in the market – they are not just benefitting themselves but giving opportunities to others in the community,” Simavi explains.