01 Mar 2017

For 50-year-old Julia Nkwele, age means nothing in her determination to achieve life’s goals, no matter how hard things seem to be.

Originally from Tutume, but married in Satau in the Chobe District, Nkwele is a tailor and fashion designer par excellence.

Her passion was ignited from watching her mother do the same although she never knew that one day she would be running her own business and excelling at it.

“My love for tailoring started at an early age as I always watched my mother doing it, and so the love grew stronger until I decided to start my own business called ULIK,” she said in an interview.

To start up this business, Nkwele had to work and save money first and when she had raised enough funds to start her dream business, she bought affordable machinery and started sewing in front of Chobe River Cottages as she had no permanent structure to work from.

“As time went by and my business grew, I got funded to the tune of P5 000 by the then Financial Assistance Policy, with which I was able to buy materials and more machinery,” she said.

As her business grew, she won massive tenders, one being to sew uniforms for a local primary school and these helped her expand and also sustain her family and build herself a soon-to-be-completed house.

All the hard work that Nkwele put on her work earned her position one in the entire country as the best dress making designer at the President’s Day Competitions in 2014.

Additionally, she and other two Batswana went to compete against more than 2 000 stalls in China, where she took position one, earning Botswana an overall first at the exhibition.

“Upon noticing the exposure my business was now getting, I decided to apply for funding with the Department of Gender Affairs so that I could buy modern machinery and quality fabrics for my customers,” she said.

She however experiences challenges in sourcing material for her business within the Chobe District and often she has to compromise her work due to this problem.

Ms Nkwele urged the youth and fellow women not to laze around expecting to be spoon-fed, but instead work hard and have the zeal and passion for what they do; she remains grateful for the support from government facilities in realising her dreams.

“If it was not for government support, I would not have managed to build this house or sustain my family,” said Nkwele. ENDS