Panel SA: Education and credit are the secret to the advancement of black entrepreneurship, says businesswoman

Businesswoman Adriana Barbosa, who closed 2021 celebrating the 20th anniversary of Feira Preta, an event of culture and entrepreneurship founded by her, sees in the digitalization of the pandemic the potential to scale up work.

Barbosa says that education and credit are the secret to taking survival entrepreneurship to opportunity entrepreneurship. And the advancement of inclusion in the value chain requires adaptation of small entrepreneurs as well as large companies.

After the launch of the online sales platform for the businesses that accelerated at PretaHub, how did it evolve? Last year was special for the Afrolab entrepreneurship education program. Digitization made it possible to scale, replicate in two more countries and have themed Afrolabs, from health to music and fashion. We made different classes and ended the year with the Feira Preta festival, which was also digitized.

We celebrate 20 years of Feira Preta in a digital celebration with more than a hundred contents produced in different areas. We had the objective of going through the process of digitization due to the pandemic. In addition to our marketplace, we put the products of entrepreneurs on three more platforms, Via, C&A and Mercado Livre.

Digitization is a bottleneck, but there are others such as access to credit. How’s this part going? In 2020, the Fair joined other organizations for the economic emergencies fund. We transferred funds to more than 600 entrepreneurs, on a non-refundable basis. We collectively raised BRL 1.7 million and distributed tickets from BRL 1,500 to BRL 2,500 to entrepreneurs throughout Brazil. In 2021, it had an aftermath.

There was still a part of financial support and we ended the year launching the acceleration program for black women with Facebook, in which we will invest in 50 businesses worth R$ 32 thousand, and another with the Alok Institute, from DJ Alok, and Black Princess beer for young people working in digital entrepreneurship, with a transfer of R$ 20 thousand.

We don’t do microcredit. The money we raise goes to waste. It’s a bet we’re making in the pandemic. Many entrepreneurs already carry debt. It’s two years of a pandemic. We didn’t want to bring one more credit and give one more headache.

And we make an assisted investment, which accompanies the journey of the entrepreneurs, from thinking about how to negotiate the indebtedness process to potential, whether for the acquisition of machinery, investment in team, product launch.

There is another bottleneck in the bureaucracy of companies to suppliers. How does the entrepreneur go through this? There is a process for the company to understand what it is like to work with black entrepreneurs. And what Feira Preta does in entrepreneurial education programs is to prepare them to dialogue with companies, to understand the logic of a company.

It is different when you are in a corporate context, with registration, system, compliance process, cash flow, of a large company supplier. This is information that the Fair tries to bring to entrepreneurs.

Once you’re in there, you can negotiate, you have your cash flow. Then comes the understanding of the company, not to take 60, 90, 120 days to make a payment to a micro-entrepreneur, because, if you do, it breaks the micro-entrepreneur.

To mitigate it, there is a little bit of this: black entrepreneurs need to learn how to supply themselves to large companies, and they need to learn how to do a process of inclusion of entrepreneurs linked to minority groups.

Was there an acceleration of this theme after George Floyd? For sure. After George Floyd, we started talking about ESG with a focus on the S, on the social. This happened in the United States. Companies began to review their practices not only environmental, but also social.

In Brazil, there is this racial cut. I’m not saying that we have a more peaceful and favorable environment. But today it’s on the agenda. Brazil has a lot to celebrate. We made progress on many issues.

When I see Feira Preta, what happened now, there are many black people within the companies that supported the dialogue to make the sponsorship happen. Lots of black people with decision-making power. There is a change underway, which we need to celebrate and leverage.

How does your great-grandmother’s story guide you in this work? I start doing business with her. My great-grandmother sold things. He had a very strong business sense. When I started, it was also without entrepreneurial education. I didn’t attend business school. I started because I needed to survive.

Today, the Fair looks at the issue of black entrepreneurship as a process of social transformation for the black population and works in the field of entrepreneurial education.

Research shows that the micro-entrepreneur is the black population. The secret is how we move from entrepreneurship of survival and necessity to opportunity. It’s education and credit.

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Graduated in event management at Universidade Anhembi Morumbi with a postgraduate degree in cultural management at USP, the businesswoman is the founder of the culture and entrepreneurship event Feira Preta, president of PretaHub and is part of the racial equality committees of companies such as Ambev and Carrefour