CUHK MBA Student’s Social Enterprise Funds Women’s Education in Ethiopia

Current full-time MBA student Antoinette Bailey is a serial entrepreneur with a social conscience.

She has co-founded Maison Ethiopie, a social enterprise which sources high quality leather from manufacturers in Ethiopia, sells leather goods internationally, and reinvests into the country. The aim is to fund the development of women’s education in Ethiopia.

The half British, half Ethiopian entrepreneur has been travelling the world – to the U.S., Europe and the Middle East – to promote the Maison Ethiopie brand.

Yet her social ventures don’t stop there. She has set up a fashion fund to support Ethiopia-based manufacturers and designers, and a UK-based film fund looking to invest in an emerging Ethiopian film market. The film fund’s first live-action film – Street Fighter: Assassin’s Fist – was featured at the Cannes Film Festival.

Bailey previously managed the private family office of an ultra high-net-worth individual, whose product portfolio includes a premier league soccer club, a well-known retail outlet and hotel in the UK.

Bailey shares with BusinessBecause.com in an interview why she made the decision to start up her own social enterprise in Ethiopia and to pursue an MBA at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) Business School, as well as what she has profited from her MBA experience so far.

Bailey’s social enterprise Maison Ethiopie has set the long-term goal to use locally-sourced leather from Ethiopia to manufacture products and sell internationally with a percentage going back and re-investing into local development.

“We want to have a charitable impact; to use part of our profits to re-invest in education and get scholarship programmes set up for women,” she states. “We’re currently selling on a small scale in London and in the UAE. We want to expand that, to start mass producing and selling in major retail outlets, and to build an international presence.”

Commenting on her decision to pursue an MBA at CUHK Business School, Bailey indicates that “I wanted to continue on the entrepreneurial route and bridge any theoretical gaps that I had.”

“I was very well-travelled in the U.S. and Europe, but I knew nothing about Asia. I wanted to find out why Asia has such a prominent presence in the global marketplace. And CUHK – with its entrepreneurship specialisation – seemed like the perfect place to do it,” she adds.

Regarding what Bailey has profited from CUHK MBA so far, she says that “I know you have all the prestige of schools like Harvard and Stanford where you can learn and take electives about doing business in Asia. But I really don’t think you can appreciate how that translates on a day-to-day basis without actually having been immersed in the culture.”

“At CUHK Business School, you work with people who approach things from different perspectives. I’ve become a much more tolerant and patient person, and I know how to deal with situations of uncertainty and to be sympathetic to different ways of approaching situations.”… Read More

Source: BusinessBecause.com
Date published: 15 June, 2016