Helping Women-Led Businesses Scale Globally: Lessons from the DHL UK-Africa Fellowship

The first time I spoke with the founder of Kedi Organics over video call, she was standing in her production facility in Kampala, holding up a jar of unrefined shea butter. “This is the best shea butter you will find anywhere,” she told me. “My customers in Uganda know that. But I cannot figure out how to make a customer in London believe it.”

That question — how do you build credibility for a product across cultures and geographies when you do not have the brand infrastructure that Western companies take for granted — became the central challenge of my DHL and GBSN GoTrade Fellowship. And answering it taught me more about product-market fit than any consumer tech playbook ever has.

The Fellowship and Why It Mattered

The GoTrade Fellowship is a programme run by DHL in partnership with the Global Business School Network (GBSN). It selects MBA students from over 150 universities worldwide and pairs them with small and medium enterprises in developing markets to help these businesses scale through cross-border trade. I was selected to participate during my MBA year at the University of Glasgow, and it was one of the experiences that validated my decision to pursue the MBA in the first place.

The fellowship is designed to be practical, not theoretical. You are not writing a case study. You are embedded with a real company, working with a real founder, solving real problems under real constraints. For someone who spent three years as a startup founder before entering the MBA, this felt more like home than the classroom.

My client was Kedi Organics — a women-led premium skincare brand based in Kampala, Uganda. The founder had built a successful local business selling unrefined shea butter and shea-based skincare products. She had a loyal customer base in Uganda and the East African region. But she had an ambition to export to the US, UK, and EU markets, and she had no idea where to start.

Understanding the Founder’s World

Before I did anything else, I spent two weeks simply listening. I joined calls with the founder, her small team, her suppliers in northern Uganda where the shea nuts are sourced, and a few of her existing customers. I wanted to understand the full value chain before proposing any changes.

What I found was a business that was operationally brilliant in many ways — the founder had deep relationships with her shea nut suppliers, maintained strict quality standards for her raw materials, and had built genuine brand loyalty locally. But the business was also running on manual processes that would not scale. Orders were tracked in a WhatsApp group. Inventory was managed in a notebook. Financial records were in a spreadsheet that had not been reconciled in months. Customer information existed in the founder’s head, not in any system.

This pattern was familiar. I had seen it at Greenflip, where artisan suppliers managed their businesses through deeply relational, memory-based systems. The challenge is not that these systems do not work — they work beautifully at a local scale. The challenge is that they break when you add the complexity of international shipping, multi-currency pricing, regulatory compliance, and customer expectations that are calibrated to Amazon Prime.

The AI Coaching Approach

One of the most interesting aspects of this fellowship was the opportunity to coach the founder on integrating AI tools into her workflows. Not AI as a buzzword. AI as a practical set of tools that can reduce the operational burden on a founder who is doing everything herself.

I approached this with a principle I have developed through my own work with AI tools across different product contexts: start with the bottleneck, not the technology. Do not ask “what can AI do?” Ask “what is taking the most time, creating the most friction, or producing the most errors?” Then see if AI can address that specific problem.

For Kedi Organics, the bottlenecks were in three areas.

Product descriptions and marketing copy. The founder was spending hours writing product descriptions for her website and social media posts. She is an excellent formulator but not a natural copywriter, and she was translating her knowledge of shea butter’s properties into generic marketing language that did not differentiate her brand. I introduced her to generative AI tools for copywriting, but with a critical framing: AI generates the first draft, you provide the expertise and the authenticity. We developed a workflow where she would speak her product knowledge into a voice note, I would use that as input context for the AI tool, and we would refine the output together. The result was copy that was faster to produce and, crucially, still sounded like her.

Financial tracking and forecasting. The spreadsheet situation needed to be addressed, but the solution was not a complex ERP system that a five-person company would never adopt. I introduced simple AI-assisted financial tracking — a structured spreadsheet template with formulas that automatically calculated margins, flagged inventory thresholds, and generated basic forecasting based on historical sales patterns. Nothing sophisticated by tech industry standards, but transformative for a business that had been operating without any systematic financial visibility.

Customer communication. With expansion into international markets, the founder would need to manage customer inquiries across time zones and in communication styles that differ from her local market. We set up templated responses for common queries and explored AI-powered customer service tools that could handle first-level inquiries. The goal was not to automate the relationship — Kedi Organics’ brand is built on personal connection — but to ensure that no inquiry went unanswered for more than twenty-four hours, regardless of time zone differences.

Building Heyando: A Lightweight Sales and Inventory System

The most tangible deliverable from the fellowship was Heyando — a lightweight sales and inventory tracking system designed specifically for Kedi Organics’ needs and constraints.

The name came from a Luganda word, chosen by the founder. The system itself was built using a combination of no-code tools and simple automations — not a custom software application, but an integrated stack that connected order intake, inventory tracking, and financial reporting in a way that required minimal technical skill to operate.

The design principles were drawn directly from my product management experience.

Principle 1: Fit the workflow, do not redesign it. The founder was already using WhatsApp for order management. Rather than asking her to switch to a new tool, we designed Heyando to integrate with her existing WhatsApp workflow — orders received via WhatsApp were logged into the system using a simple form, which updated inventory and financial records automatically.

Principle 2: Start with what matters most. We did not try to build a comprehensive business management system. We focused on three things: knowing exactly what is in stock, knowing exactly what has been sold and at what margin, and knowing when to reorder raw materials. Everything else could wait.

Principle 3: Design for the founder, not the consultant. I would not be there in six months. Whatever we built had to be operable by the founder and her small team without ongoing technical support. This meant no complex dashboards, no multi-step data entry, and clear documentation for every process.

The results were measurable. Within the fellowship period, we achieved a 30% reduction in operational overhead — defined as the time the founder spent on administrative tasks versus customer-facing and production activities. Inventory accuracy improved from “roughly right” to precisely tracked. And the founder had, for the first time, a clear view of her unit economics across product lines, which informed pricing decisions for the export market.

Cross-Border Trade and Product-Market Fit Across Cultures

The most intellectually challenging part of the fellowship was the cross-border trade dimension. How do you take a product that has achieved product-market fit in Uganda and achieve it again in the UK, US, and EU?

The naive answer is “just ship it.” The reality is far more complex.

Regulatory compliance. Skincare products entering the UK market must comply with UK Cosmetic Regulations, which require product notification through the SCPN (Submit Cosmetic Product Notification) system, safety assessments by a qualified assessor, and compliant labelling including INCI ingredient lists. The EU has its own Cosmetic Regulation (EC 1223/2009) with similar but not identical requirements. The US has FDA oversight with a different regulatory framework entirely. Each market requires a separate compliance pathway, and the cost of compliance is non-trivial for a small business.

I helped the founder map the regulatory landscape for each target market and prioritise them. We decided to start with the UK — partly because of geographic and institutional familiarity from the Glasgow MBA context, partly because the UK market has a growing appetite for ethical, sustainably sourced skincare, and partly because the regulatory pathway, while demanding, is well-documented and navigable.

Brand positioning. In Uganda, Kedi Organics is positioned as a premium local brand. The shea butter’s quality speaks for itself in a market where consumers understand the product category. In the UK, the brand is unknown, the product category (raw shea butter) is niche, and the consumer needs education about why unrefined shea butter from northern Uganda is different from the refined shea butter they might find at Boots.

We developed a positioning framework that led with provenance and process — the story of the shea nut harvest, the women’s cooperatives that produce the butter, and the traditional processing methods that preserve the product’s bioactive properties. This is not manufactured storytelling. It is the genuine narrative of the product, presented in a way that resonates with a UK consumer who values transparency and ethical sourcing.

The parallel to my Greenflip experience was striking. When I built the artisan marketplace, I learned that consumers do not buy “handmade” as a label — they buy the story behind the product. The same principle applies here. UK consumers will not buy “shea butter from Uganda” as a category. They will buy Kedi Organics’ shea butter when they understand why it is exceptional and who benefits from their purchase.

Pricing across markets. This is where product management frameworks proved most useful. Pricing a product that costs X to produce in Uganda for a market where comparable products retail at Y in the UK requires understanding the full cost stack: production, compliance, packaging (which may need to change for the export market), shipping, import duties, and distribution margins. We modelled the unit economics for three scenarios — direct-to-consumer via e-commerce, wholesale via a UK distributor, and marketplace via Amazon UK — and found that D2C e-commerce offered the best margin profile but required the highest investment in brand building.

What This Experience Taught Me

The DHL Fellowship reinforced several convictions I had been developing throughout my career, and challenged a few assumptions I did not realise I held.

Conviction reinforced: the best product work is empathy work. Understanding the founder’s constraints — financial, technical, cultural, personal — was the prerequisite for every useful recommendation. Tools and frameworks are only valuable when they are calibrated to the context of the person who will use them.

Conviction reinforced: AI is a capability multiplier, not a strategy. Every AI tool we introduced solved a specific operational problem. None of them changed the fundamental strategy of the business. The strategy — build a premium, ethically sourced skincare brand for export — was a human decision informed by market understanding and personal ambition. AI made the execution faster. It did not make the direction clearer.

Assumption challenged: “best practices” are context-dependent. I arrived with a set of assumptions about what a “well-run” business looks like, drawn from the tech and consumer product contexts I had worked in. Many of those assumptions were irrelevant or actively unhelpful in the context of a small Ugandan skincare company. The founder’s relational approach to supplier management, her intuitive understanding of customer preferences, and her deep product knowledge were competitive advantages that no system or process could replicate. The goal was not to replace her methods with “professional” ones. It was to augment her methods with systems that could handle the complexity that international expansion would introduce.

Assumption challenged: scale requires infrastructure first. I used to believe that you need systems before you can scale. Kedi Organics showed me that you can scale relationships and reputation before you scale operations — and that the operational infrastructure should be built to support the scale you have earned, not the scale you aspire to. This is a lesson I wish I had learned earlier in my own startup journey.

The Bigger Picture: Women-Led Businesses and Global Trade

The fellowship exists because of a structural reality: women-led businesses in developing markets face disproportionate barriers to international trade. These barriers are not just financial (though access to trade finance is a major constraint). They are informational (navigating export regulations), infrastructural (logistics and supply chain management), and institutional (credibility gaps in markets where they have no track record).

What I saw during this fellowship is that these barriers are addressable. Not easily, not quickly, but addressable — with the right combination of practical support, digital tools, and strategic guidance. The founder of Kedi Organics does not lack ambition, capability, or product quality. She lacks the infrastructure and knowledge that founders in developed markets take for granted.

Programmes like the GoTrade Fellowship bridge that gap, one business at a time. And the product management skillset — user research, systems thinking, iterative development, data-driven decision making — turns out to be exactly what is needed to bridge it effectively.

I came away from this experience more convinced than ever that the most impactful product work is not always the most technically sophisticated. Sometimes it is a spreadsheet that works, a workflow that saves four hours a week, and a brand story that helps a woman in Kampala sell her shea butter in London. That is product management in its most essential form.