Dar es Salaam city administrators have been relentlessly appealing to women traders to put to use free training being extended by the College of Business Education (CBE) to enhance their businesses and access international markets.

There has recently been a three-day training session for over 600 such traders from Ilala District, who were asked to appreciate the need to shift from traditional business practices to more informed and strategic approaches. Many are admittedly doing that already, and it also affects their daily contact with wider reality.

What is ironical in this context isn’t the danger of women businesses failing but, on the contrary, what ‘dangers’ there might be if all women seeking to do business actually succeed.

Evidently, there would be greater equality with men in the number of businesses owned or operated by women and those run by men, but the comparison would likely stop there.

What would be in free fall is expectation of conformity to ‘traditional roles’, which have for decades been faulted as relics of patriarchal oppression.

What will likely improve is that there will be greater avenues of assistance for women, especially those raising children single-handed or taking care of weak adults only courtesy of limited funds available for women.

Here the picture is less uniform and definitely unclear, as in many cases the ‘women in business’ movement tends to fortify patriarchal ties while there is a dimension of weakening such links.

Some successful men enable their spouses to run businesses and then they access credit and other avenues, tending to fortify the household but not necessarily reaching out to other women.

This privilege of women being successful is less directed at uplifting other women as activists would be inclined to believe, or to wish, but rather accessing privileges that women have been for long restricted from pursuing. 

When both wife and husband work, the way in which time is parcelled out during the day changes dramatically, as each of the partners learns to allow the other to work more or less freely.

Yet it‘s somewhat interesting to try and find out who is raising worries about such ‘division of labour’. Most of those running businesses will likely be satisfied with ‘what there is,’ though it is hard to use the same ‘language’ when it is either spouse or partner – or both spouses or partners – having money to spare.

What society has always wished for is that mothers be available for the children, which is largely the case with front-door or street-side businesses close to the living premises.

When a woman has scaled that level of preoccupation and branches out into actual business affairs, the situation often changes.

Here it is society that worries about the likely consequences, including trespassing on routine limitations when having the cash, etc.

While this is fairly easy to grasp, the disquiet that public leaders make raises worries as it has what it takes to bring up movements demanding that traditional roles be restored. Here one discerns both pros and cons calling for action to make things agreeable by and among all parties concerned.