hub for tired students looking to treat themselves to something cool and different. “It’s something uniting people here,” Kalisa Migendo, a 24-year-old agriculture student, says. “If you need to go out and talk to a friend, a girl or a boy, you come to Inzozi Nziza for an ice cream.” Most of the ingredients are sourced locally and the milk comes from a depot in nearby Nyanza. The vanilla beans and cocoa are imported. Inzozi Nziza was opened by the theatre director Odile Gakire Katese. She met Alexis Miesen and Jennie Dundas, co-founders of Blue Marble Ice Cream in Brooklyn, New York, and formed a partnership to open the shop in 2010. “An ice-cream shop, Katese proposed, might help to put the human pieces back together by rebuilding spirits, hopes and family traditions,” Miesen says. At the start, Miesen and Dundas owned the shop in partnership with its staff and had shares in the business, which is a cooperative and non-profit. They did not set financial targets, but waited for 18 months before they transferred their shares to the women, who had by then proved their business credentials. The shop’s success is no exception, says Fatuma Ndangiza, deputy chief executive of the Rwanda Governance Board. “Small businesses are mostly managed by women but when it comes to big business where you have to compete for big tenders, very few women are there. Women