The New Idea

Farhana founded Creating Economic Opportunities for Women (C.E.O. Women) to help refugee and immigrant women become more self-sufficient by teaching them English, communications, and entrepreneurship skills through relevant novellas (soap operas) rather than dry textbooks. C.E.O. Women keeps its courses affordable and accessible to immigrant women of limited financial means by offering them in collaboration with public schools for adult education, and with other community-based organizations.

Farhana and C.E.O. Women have brought two important functional innovations to the fields of vocational ESL and microenterprise. The first is to replace standard textbooks with educational novellas starring immigrant and refugee women entangled in issues of family, immigration, personal relationships, and business. The students relate to the characters and situations in novellas, and in doing so, they learn English and communication skills to manage a business. In addition, every story includes lessons and a workbook about entrepreneurship and microenterprise.

The second innovation is the design of the first “Entrepreneurial ESL” courses. When women are exposed to the stories in the novellas, they begin internalizing important lessons about how to plan, start, and fund a new business. Unlike basic ESL or other vocational ESL courses, C.E.O. Women works closely with its students on business basics, turning many would-be low-wage employees into employers and small business owners who will contribute far more to their families and communities. Even students who do not start businesses report a higher level of financial literacy, English proficiency, and self-confidence than before the program.

The Problem

Immigrant and refugee women in the U.S. struggle to become economically self-sufficient and contributing members of society because of language, cultural, and gender barriers and an inability to apply their skills to the local economy. U.S. Census figures show that by 2010, the state of California alone will have an estimated 1.1 million immigrant or refugee women who possess limited English abilities but have an interest in starting their own businesses. In California, the federal government and citizen organizations (COs) meet less than 3 percent of this need annually.

Farhana firmly believes that the issues of access to resources, knowledge, and connections prevent women from achieving better economic livelihoods. These obstacles are frequently encountered by all immigrants, preventing their creative energy from bearing fruit in our country.

The women’s success is impeded not only by language, but also by a lack of understanding of the American financial and business system. Existing public and nonprofit education systems lack the relevant resources and training to offer them a path to self-sufficiency and business success, and private offerings are too expensive to reach the low-income populations. Often available only in monolingual formats (Spanish or English), regular business training programs are costly to operate and do not address limited fluency in English. This leaves large segments of this new population stuck in poverty, regardless of whether they have good business and entrepreneurial instincts.

Farhana recognizes that C.E.O. Women has appeal beyond immigrant and refugee women and that her innovations will be adopted by others interested in spreading entrepreneurship or improving the relevance of ESL. Farhana focuses on this population because low-income female immigrants and refugees find it hardest to rise out of poverty. Since the Social Security Administration started keeping track more than 60 years ago, the poorest people in the U.S. have been and still are women. Farhana realizes that changing women’s self-sufficiency when they enter the U.S. breaks a cycle of poverty before it can begin.

The Strategy

Farhana believes, and her experience shows, that immigrant and refugee women possess talents, skills, and knowledge that could make them self-sufficient and prosperous if they also possessed entrepreneurship, English, and communication skills. Most women are unaware that they need such skills, and even fewer can afford the business classes to learn them. So Farhana is meeting these aspiring women where she can find them—in public ESL courses.

Since 2002, Farhana has used the partnership that she forged with Oakland Adult and Career Education in Oakland, California, to develop the C.E.O. Women methodology. Hundreds of women have graduated from the program, which now includes three different novella textbooks, 16 weeks of training, 6 months of coaching, a lab for entrepreneurship, and ongoing assistance for the women who have started businesses. In 2006, C.E.O. Women launched a second pilot site in collaboration with Contra Costa County Adult School in California.

Farhana is already thinking about how to spread her method to a much broader audience. In 2005, C.E.O. Women taught its methodology via teleconference to 17 microenterprise and immigrant service organizations in the U.S. Five of those 17 have continued a relationship with C.E.O. Women wherein they use elements of C.E.O. Women’s methodology but not the full program. Farhana sees telecasting of its program as a part of C.E.O. Women’s future.

Soon C.E.O. Women will reach a much larger audience with its ESL novellas and entrepreneurship training by converting them to media programs. Farhana’s early success and innovative curricula have caught the attention of public broadcasters and even cable networks such as Univision, whose Spanish language novellas are among its most popular shows. Univision is the largest Spanish-language network in the U.S. Although it may take some time to work out formatting and distance-learning portions of the program, next year C.E.O. Women will pilot a telenovella version of its course for distribution via DVD to women in their homes.

DVDs are a lower cost alternative to the classroom course, and though there will always be a need for classroom instruction, Farhana doesn’t expect that C.E.O. Women’s clients will be the only people using her in-class curriculum. In the future, Farhana envisions the series being aired on television to reach a broader audience of immigrant women. Once the show is adopted by broadcasters, Farhana and her organization will focus on producing the workbooks, novellas, and other materials that other vocational ESL instructors will use. C.E.O. Women’s message and methods will become the gold standard for vocational ESL courses. For this innovation, Farhana was named one of three Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year national finalists in the category of Supporter of Entrepreneurship. C.E.O. Women was the only CO in the final round.

The Person

The daughter of immigrants—Farhana’s mother is from Pakistan and her father, Bangladesh—Farhana describes her upbringing in the U.S. as “comfortable.” Her mother was the first woman in her family to graduate from high school, and her father was a successful doctor. Yet Farhana was still deeply moved by the debilitating effects of poverty on other women in her family.

Farhana was close to her aunt who had been “married off” at 17 years old to a man who could not keep a job and resorted to abusing his wife whenever he was ill-tempered. Farhana’s aunt ultimately divorced him and, despite his treatment of her, she was stigmatized in her community. She went on welfare, did not remarry, and raised her three sons on her own. The boys were often in trouble, sometimes with the law, and their mother survived on a combination of her welfare check and money earned from day work. This was paid in cash so that there was no paper trail that could affect her welfare eligibility.

Long before Farhana dreamed of creating economic opportunities for women, she saw how intelligent and talented immigrant and refugee women like her aunt became trapped in lives of poverty. While at the University of Natal in Durban, South Africa, Farhana took a course in gender studies that she credits with changing her life, and she learned of Muhammad Yunus’s groundbreaking approach to microenterprise. Farhana earned a dual degree in philosophy and economic studies and went to work for Community Action Agency (CAA) in San Rafael, California, where she developed a microenterprise program for women. When the program ran into a cash-flow crunch a year later, C.E.O. Women was founded.

Selling her skills as a grant writer, bookkeeper, salesperson, and clerical worker, Farhana became a full-time consultant to nonprofit and for-profit companies and also full-time founder of C.E.O. Women. She worked 16-hour days from 2000 to 2004, finding ways to continue to deliver the training and support she had begun while with CAA. For most of the time, Farhana was a one-woman show and only began to collect a full-time salary in July 2004.

Farhana has traveled back and forth to Bangladesh since she was a young girl and is conversant in English and Spanish.