The baker who bet on herself: Esther's story of turning cassava into a future

Esther had run out of easy options. A 29-year-old single mother of four in Maridi, she was watching her household fall apart at the joins over school fees. Two of her children had already been sent home from class because she couldn't pay. She was weighing whether to leave her kids and search for casual labor in town, the kind of decision no mother wants to make, and the kind that rarely fixes anything for long.

In June 2026, Esther was selected as one of 75 participants for the Empowered Worldview training in Maridi County, part of the program's first group of 25 trainees. She showed up carrying the same weight she carried everywhere: worry about fees, worry about food, worry about what came next.

What shifted her thinking was not a lecture. It was a simple role-playing exercise trainers call it the “longest-line exercise” that asked participants to look at what they already had, rather than what they lacked. For Esther, it was a genuine reminder. She realized she had been so focused on what was missing that she had never taken inventory of what was already in her hands, skill, creativity, and the will to use both.

When her training transport refund came through, Esther made a decision that would have felt reckless a month earlier she put the money into a small bread business, making tamiya, a local bread, from cassava, oil, salt, and onions. Her first investment was modest, South Sudanese Pounds (SSP) 16,000 ($3). Her first batch sold for SSP 42,000 ($7) a profit of SSP 26,000 ($5) more than she made from anything in recent memory.

She did not stop there. “I reinvested the SSP 25,000 ($4) back into supplies, and the next round brought in SSP 57,000 ($10) double,” she recalls. As she learned the rhythm of her own small enterprise.

“Thank God, I was able to pay SSP 65,000 ($12) overdue school fees, getting my children back where they belong, in class,” She adds. And she has set aside SSP 285,000 ($51) toward a much bigger goal, cultivating two feddans of maize, a project she estimates will cost SSP 350,000 ($62) in total once complete.

What makes Esther's story land hardest is this, she never had the chance to attend school herself. The woman now running a bread business, paying fees, and planning a maize field learned to read a balance sheet of her own life without ever sitting in a classroom.

“With the Empowered Worldview training, I understand how to use the little I have to create income,” Esther says. “I am sure I will never be poor again.”

It's not a boast. It's a plan, already in motion one loaf, one harvest, one paid school fee at a time.

By Pr. Lam Duop Lam, Faith and Development Coordinator/ World Vision and FARM STEW South Sudan