Movers and Makers: Joining an Ecosystem or Building One

AVODA has trained 600+ founders from 1,247+ applicants and supported 100+ startups across 18 programs in three countries. None of those five public figures is split by gender, and an essay about women founders owes the reader that fact first. Joining an ecosystem means walking into rooms that already exist, such as a hub, an accelerator or a buyers’ association, and drawing on the trust other people built there. Building one means making the room that is missing. Most women founders in East Africa do both at once, and the useful skill is choosing which room to build and which to join.

Key Takeaways

Joining an ecosystem spends trust that other people accumulated. Building one fills a new stock of trust from zero, slowly, through small repeated exchanges.
Women in the Technology and Innovation Ecosystem: From Movers to Makers in America (CRC Press, 2026) follows women who moved into a dense ecosystem whose rooms were already standing, and became makers inside it.
The book’s finding that transfers best is its quietest one: the migrant women in its Italian case study financed themselves and grew through informal trust networks, which is how many Ugandan women already bank, through village savings groups.
The finding that transfers worst is the assumption that a room is waiting. Uganda’s own fund for women lends only to groups of 10 to 15, so the state asks women to build the room before the money arrives.
The Join-or-Build Map scores four rooms (buyers, money, counsel, peers) and tells a founder to build at most one at a time and join the rest.

What the book means by movers and makers

The book is an edited volume of nine chapters, compiled by Manleenjot Kaur, Melissa Hyunh and Tilottama Singh. Its subject is women who relocated to the United States and built careers and companies in technology and innovation. The editors explain the title in their preface: many of the women “began their American journeys as spouses, students, or job-seekers” and, over time, became makers “of companies, code, communities, careers, and change.”

Read as ecosystem theory, the movement runs one way. A mover arrives, adjusts, finds the network and becomes productive inside a system that was there before her. Chapter 7 names the rooms she finds, from Girls Who Code to Techstars programs for female founders, and its proposals are reforms to those rooms: funding equity and mentorship pipelines.

The editors deserve credit for gathering voices that usually get reduced to a visa category. Before borrowing their frame, I checked its figures. One checks out. The chapter’s claim that all-female founding teams received 2.1% of US venture capital matches PitchBook’s count for 2022, as KQED’s Forum reported in 2023. Another does not trace. The chapter credits the National Science Foundation with finding that women in mentorship networks were 63% more likely to keep ventures going past three years, and I could find no NSF report carrying that figure, so it stays out of this essay. And the chapter most useful for East Africa, Giulio Palmas’s study of migrant women entrepreneurs, is set in Sardinia and reports two of ten interviews, which makes it a pair of portraits from Italy inside a book about America.

Where the frame holds in Kampala

Palmas’s two founders, a language-school owner and a fitness instructor, both started on personal savings and grew through people who trusted them. The first described her early students this way: “I had these six engineers who were there for me for everything.” They found her an accountant and hung her blackboard. Both women financed themselves, and one said she had been unaware that grants for migrant founders existed.

That pattern is the ordinary condition of women’s enterprise in Uganda, at far greater scale. Uganda ranked first in the 2020 edition of the Mastercard Index of Women Entrepreneurs, with women making up 39.6% of the country’s business owners. FSD Uganda’s reading of the FinScope 2023 survey found 62% of women formally included against 75% of men, and named limited access to collateral among the barriers women meet at formal lenders. It also found a strong preference across the country for local community savings groups, the ekibiina. The 2018 survey had already shown more women than men relying mainly on informal finance, with village savings and loan associations reaching four in ten women and three in ten men.

So the book’s minor finding is East Africa’s major one. Women here are makers already, and much of what they make is the room itself: the savings group, the chama, the WhatsApp circle of traders who lend each other stock on a slow week. Trust in those rooms behaves like a stock. It fills through small, repeated exchanges, a weekly contribution, a loan repaid on the day it falls due, and it drains when a member defaults. A founder who joins a mature savings group draws on years of other women’s punctuality. A founder who starts one begins at zero and fills it a Thursday at a time.

A waiting room, a deep pool, an educated mover

Three assumptions hold in the book’s America and slip somewhere on the way to Kampala.

The first is that the room is waiting. The book’s movers crossed a border into what its preface calls one of the most demanding innovation ecosystems in the world. When they became makers, they made companies, and the hubs, accelerators and mentoring charities were already standing. In Uganda, the government’s women’s enterprise fund, known as UWEP and run by the Ministry of Gender, lends interest-free through a revolving fund, and its official guide says women receive the money only in groups of 10 to 15 members. Its design assumes women will build the room first and receive money second.

The second is the size of the pool. The share looks similar on both continents: 2.1% of US venture capital went to all-female teams in 2022, and about 2% of African startup funding went to startups with a female CEO in 2024, according to Africa: The Big Deal. The pools are another matter. That African 2% came to $48 million in 2024, against nearly $2.2 billion raised by startups with a male CEO, across a whole continent. A reform agenda written to widen a woman’s share of a deep pool says little to a founder whose working capital comes from her savings group.

The third is who the movers are. In the book, the movers are mostly educated women arriving as spouses, students or job-seekers. In Uganda, the largest moving population is displaced. UNHCR counted about 1.97 million refugees and asylum-seekers in Uganda at the end of 2025, living in 13 refugee settlements and in Kampala, and many of those settlements lie a long way from Kampala’s hubs. For a South Sudanese tailor in a settlement, “joining the ecosystem” is advice without a street address. The rooms she needs she will build with her neighbors, which is the subject of displacement entrepreneurship.

A smaller caution sits under all three. The rooms a new founder hears about first are the best connected ones, such as the hub with the most events. Asking around therefore overstates how many rooms exist, because a well-connected room comes up in every conversation and a quiet one rarely comes up at all.

The Join-or-Build Map

A founder has a fixed stock of evenings for relationships, and every invitation asks for some of them. The Join-or-Build Map spends those evenings on purpose. It names four rooms every small business needs and asks three questions of each.

The four rooms:

Buyers. Where she meets people who pay: a market association, a distributor’s network, a supermarket or corporate supplier list.
Money. Where she saves and borrows: a savings group, a SACCO, a bank, a government fund.
Counsel. Where she gets answers on tax, contracts and pricing: a mentor, an accountant, an accelerator.
Peers. Where she sits with founders at her stage who will tell her the truth about her numbers.

The three questions, asked of each room:

Is there a room within reach? Within a day’s travel or a phone call, meeting on a schedule she can keep.
Will it admit her on terms she can meet? Collateral, fees, meeting times, childcare, language.
Does she leave with something she can bank? A sale, a loan, a decision, a correction.

Three yeses mean join, and be the most reliable member there. A missing room, or one whose terms sit beyond her reach, marks a candidate for building. Then comes the rule: build at most one room at a time, and build the smallest version that works. Five women who meet on Thursday evenings to review each other’s prices is a room. A registered association with a constitution and a launch event is a project, and it can wait until the Thursday meeting has filled its stock of trust.

Starting small is deliberate. The first weeks of a new room carry low stakes, a contribution before a loan and a price review before a joint order, because each round shows the members who turns up on time. Cohort design raises its own questions, taken up in what the outcome data shows for women-only cohorts.

Take a four-person juice business, invented here to show the map at work. Its founder finds a SACCO that lends to her, so she joins. The supermarket supplier list admits only producers above her volume, so she builds: three producers pool volume to meet the minimum order. An accountant two streets away takes her on, so she joins again. Peers at her stage are the room she has yet to find, and she defers it until the joint order is running. One room to build this quarter, two to join.

Unpaid work and the promotability trap

Linda Babcock, Maria Recalde, Lise Vesterlund and Laurie Weingart, writing in the American Economic Review in 2017, found that women volunteer for, are asked to do, and accept tasks with low promotability more often than men. In their university field sample, female faculty were about 2.7 times as likely as male faculty to volunteer for a committee. Convening a women’s network is that kind of task. People praise it, the fee is zero, and the hours come out of the business.

I concede the point in full. A woman founder in Kampala is asked to chair, coordinate and host far more often than she is asked for a quotation, and every network evening she organizes for someone else’s program is an evening her own books wait. Building a room costs her hours she could have spent selling.

The map answers the objection with its third question. A room earns building only when the founder herself leaves it with something she can bank. The supermarket pool passes, because it opens a buyer. A launch event for a donor’s women’s initiative usually fails, because the stock of trust it fills sits on the donor’s books. The question sorts rooms by whose ledger they fill.

The section of wall in front of your own house

When Jerusalem’s wall was rebuilt, Nehemiah 3 records that the priests above the Horse Gate made repairs “each in front of his own house,” and the chapter repeats the pattern family by family down the line. Households took the stretch they lived beside, and guilds and towns took the stretches between. Set that list beside two premises the economics above already granted: trust fills slowly, and the hours of building fall on whoever volunteers. Read as a budget, those premises say build as little as possible and charge for the rest. That is prudent advice, and it leaves a founder without a reason to build anything once the arithmetic looks thin. Nehemiah’s list gives the reason and the limit together. A family that repaired the stretch opposite its own door protected its own house and its neighbors’ in one act, and no household was asked to carry the whole circuit. The room to build is the one opposite your own door, built to the length you can hold, where the same evening’s work serves your household and your street.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does “movers to makers” mean?

It is the title of a 2026 CRC Press volume edited by Manleenjot Kaur, Melissa Hyunh and Tilottama Singh. It describes women who relocated to the United States as spouses, students or job-seekers (movers) and went on to build companies, research and careers in technology (makers). The frame assumes an existing ecosystem the mover can enter.

What is the difference between joining and building an ecosystem?

Joining means entering rooms that already exist, such as an accelerator, a savings group or a buyers’ association, and drawing on trust its members built over years. Building means creating a missing room from zero. Built rooms fill their stock of trust slowly, through small repeated exchanges, so a founder should build at most one at a time.

Do findings about women founders in America apply to Uganda?

Some do. The book’s evidence that migrant women self-finance and grow through informal trust networks matches Ugandan practice closely. Its assumption that hubs, mentors and investors are waiting fits poorly: Uganda’s women’s fund lends only to groups of 10 to 15, so women often must build the room before money reaches them.

How do I know whether to start a new savings group or join an existing one?

Put the groups within reach through the three questions of the Join-or-Build Map. If one meets on a schedule you can keep, admits you on terms you can meet, and sends you home with savings or a loan, join it and become its most punctual member. Start a new group only when none passes, and start it small.

Should a woman founder agree to lead a women’s business network?

Apply the third question of the Join-or-Build Map first: will she leave each meeting with something she can bank, such as a buyer, a loan or a correction? If the network fills her own ledger, it can be the one room she builds this quarter. If it mainly fills a sponsor’s, she can decline with a clear conscience.

Next Step

The map needs a pen, four rows and one quiet evening: mark each room join, build or defer, and name the single room you will build this quarter. Then take the AVODA Business Capability Assessment. It asks how you would put capital to work and how you know it will pay, then opens a scored Business Assessment Matrix, and within a day AVODA sends a note on where your answers place you. Laid beside your map, that note shows whether the room you chose answers a real gap or merely the loudest invitation, and it can save you a quarter of evenings spent filling someone else’s ledger.

Sources and Evidence

Kaur, Hyunh and Singh (eds.), Women in the Technology and Innovation Ecosystem: From Movers to Makers in America, CRC Press, 2026, DOI 10.1201/9781003604402: the book; preface, chapter 6 (Palmas) and chapter 7 quoted and checked.
Routledge, Women in Industry 4.0 book series page: publisher listing for the volume and its editors.
KQED Forum, “Venture Capital Still Largely Leaves Out Women-led Companies” (August 2023): PitchBook’s 2.1% share for all-female US teams in 2022, used to check the book’s figure.
Africa: The Big Deal, 2024 funding by founder gender: $48 million to female-CEO startups in 2024, 2% of the total, against nearly $2.2 billion to startups with a male CEO.
Mastercard press release on the 2020 Mastercard Index of Women Entrepreneurs, “Africa claims top three spots in Mastercard Index” (January 2021), as republished by TechAwk: Uganda first at 39.6% of business owners.
FSD Uganda, “Leveraging Insights from Uganda’s 2023 FinScope Survey for Product Design” (August 2024): 62% of women formally included against 75% of men; limited collateral as a barrier; preference for community savings groups.
FSD Uganda, “FinScope 2018: The case for a deeper and more inclusive financial sector in Uganda”: more women than men relying mainly on informal finance; savings groups reaching four in ten women and three in ten men.
Kamuli District, UWEP steps for accessing funds: women receive Uganda Women Entrepreneurship Programme funds only in groups of 10 to 15 members.
Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development, “Lessons Learned About the Uganda Women’s Entrepreneurship Programme” (August 2022): interest-free loans through a revolving fund, the Women’s Enterprise Fund.
UNHCR Operational Data Portal, Uganda Country Refugee Response: 2025 End of Year Inter-Sector Dashboard: about 1.97 million refugees and asylum-seekers at end-2025, across 13 settlements and Kampala.
Babcock, Recalde, Vesterlund and Weingart, “Gender Differences in Accepting and Receiving Requests for Tasks with Low Promotability,” American Economic Review 107(3), 2017: the hostile witness.
Harvard Gender Action Portal, summary of Babcock et al. (2017): female faculty about 2.7 times as likely as male faculty to volunteer for a committee.
Nehemiah 3:28, Bible Gateway: “each in front of his own house” (NIV).