The kiwi woman helping found women business collectives 

In her acceptance speech for one of this year’s Kea World Class New Zealand awards, Dr Natasha Anushri (Anu) Anandaraja talked about what a difference one woman had made in her life.

The educator, paediatrician, public health practitioner and social activist was born and raised in Taranaki to Sri Lankan immigrant parents. 

She referred to a “Mrs Hall”, her high school English teacher at New Plymouth Girls’ High School who said something that had stayed with her for life. In grading an essay the then 13-year-old had written about dating boys, the teacher said “You’re too intelligent to pretend you’re dizzily obsessed with dating boys. Try harder”. 

Anandaraja says she realised she didn’t have to pretend to be something she was not in order to get ahead. 

She was the director of global health and public health at the internationally acclaimed Mount Sinai Hospital in New York from 2008 and 2016 and then in 2017 created Women Together. The New Zealand-registered organisation connects women, catalysing and funding the transfer of knowledge and skills to help them find ways to become financially independent.

During the Covid crisis she also co-founded the not-for-profit Covid Courage to address the shortage of PPE for frontline healthcare workers in New York City hospitals. Covid Courage mobilised volunteers and donors to distribute more than 30,000 pieces of PPE in communities across New York and New Jersey.

The New York-based global health consultant and educator is now focused on how to expand Women Together, including into New Zealand, and would like to eventually be able to work on it full time.

The organisation has worked with 12 groups or around 500 women and girls in Malawi, in east Africa, on a lean annual budget of US$30,000–US$70,000, with the help of a lot of pro-bono work and volunteer staff. 

While not a huge amount, that sort of money goes a long way in Malawi. But Anandaraja says it will need a lot more funding as it moves into Western economies such as New Mexico and New Zealand. 

She estimates at least US$500,000 a year will be needed for its work with women from Pueblo Indian tribes in New Mexico where land ownership is their biggest issue.

“We have proof of concept in one space and want to see how it works in other spaces. The only restriction is funding. While that is a big one it can be overcome,” she says.

Women Together is seeking charitable status and applying for larger grants, while also considering adding angel investing to the mix, based off a profit share from the women’s business endeavours. 

The spark

The idea for Women Together came out of Anandaraja’s years of work at Mount Sinai helping create a global health education programme that enabled medical students and doctors to work in underserved communities with NGOs and other government agencies.

As a paediatrician, she also helped set up healthcare programmes for women and children, largely in east Africa.

But over the years she became disillusioned with the global development system.

“I was disillusioned with the enormous amount of money being spent that made no impact on the ground, and disillusioned with the colonial attitude to making change in other countries.”

For example, in Mozambique local women said their biggest problem was elephants rampaging through their villages and destroying crops. But the system had no way of dealing with the elephants and instead just focused on the resulting malnutrition that occurred.

After things went south for her at Mount Sinai (see more later on the law suit), she decided to set up a group that did things differently. 

“The way I wanted to do it was to start with listening, and go back into those communities of women I was working with and say ‘what it is you want to do, what is the biggest challenge for you, your family and community, and if you could change one thing, what would it be?’.”

The response from Malawi women was firewood. Many women were spending 40 hours a week collecting firewood to cook with, sometimes cutting and collecting it at night to avoid forest rangers. 

Women Together provided seed money and skills training after finding a local cook stove supplier that would then teach the women to make their own. They set up business collectives for the production lines and also provided additional skills such as book-keeping, business management and how to deal with the local village-owned savings and loan structures.

So far the groups have sold over 3,000 cook stoves, cut their firewood consumption by 60 percent, and have money in their pockets to feed their children and send them to school via profit-sharing arrangements they worked out themselves. 

Anandaraja says the women are now building confidence for bigger businesses that Women Together will help fund. One group has bought two plots of land and created a dairy farm on one, are planning a maize mill on the other, are setting up a butchery, and have a goal of eventually owning the main areas of land in the town to provide all the basic services they need. 

The businesses are run as collectives rather than individually owned to encourage togetherness, she says.

“Women have traditionally been divided and conquered,” she says. “We wanted to build togetherness because we know people go further together.”

The next step is the women's groups having sufficient income to provide seed money to others wanting to start up a business collective rather than relying on Women Together.

Land ownership

The biggest issue identified by the Pueblo Indian women they have started working with has been land ownership.

Most land owned by indigenous tribes in New Mexico sits under federal or tribal council governance. 

The only option for the women's groups is collective private ownership, and Women Together is trying to help them work out the best model for ownership in perpetuity that would allow them to set up businesses on the land.

“We’re in the middle of a big experiment but I have every belief we can figure this out together,” she says. 

Business projects the women have talked about include restarting traditional agriculture practices, indigenous arts, and reviving building adobe structures.

While things are at a nascent stage in New Zealand, Anandaraja says housing and land security are also likely to be big issues.

“Economic empowerment can’t be sustained unless you have secure access to land. If you can be thrown off your farm or lose your house at a moment’s notice, there is no economic security.” 

“At this point, it’s about listening and finding out where is the entry point here.”

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Business grit

Caffeine asked Anandaraja what traits had led to the Malawi startup founders being successful. 

She says the collective nature of the businesses means people are willing to work together and overcome disagreements. When you live next door, share the same water source, and have kids that go to the same school, you can’t afford to mess up those relationships.

“It has been years now and we know there have been disagreements but they say we give feedback to each other and keep moving on.”

The other main trait is absolute determination to make it work. 

“These women don’t play around in Malawi because it is their survival. They succeed or fail together and if they fail, there is no income in their household to put food on the table.”

The law suit

Anandaraja has needed her own grit to deal with a lawsuit that she has been embroiled in against her former employer, Mount Sinai in New York.

In 2019, she and seven co-plaintiffs that were current and former employees of the Arnhold Institute for Global Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital filed a lawsuit alleging age, sex and race discrimination.

The lawsuit alleged that after the school received a $12.5 million contribution in 2014 to expand the global health team's work, the medical school dean Dr Dennis Charney hired Dr Prabhot Singh as director of the institute. The inexperienced 32-year-old’s appointment went against the advice of a search committee that had recommended a highly qualified female candidate, the lawsuit alleged. 

Young men hired for leadership positions under Charney and Singh were given more prestigious titles and paid substantially more than their female counterparts, while one, Bruno Silva, is alleged to have regularly made vulgar statements to fellow women employees and donors, including crude remarks about their appearances.

Complaints to Mount Sinai through HR channels fell on deaf ears, Anandaraja claims. One of the hospital’s HR team even offered to give the plaintiffs a book they had recently read about why women think they have been discriminated against when they have not. 

Four of the plaintiffs, including Anandaraja, were dismissed from the federal case because they were deemed to be outside the statutory time limit.

In 2022 she then co-filed a new complaint against Mount Sinai in a New York State court. Anandaraja was one of two plaintiffs that again had their complaints dismissed for the same reason as the federal case and they are appealing that ruling.

Anandaraja says she’s not “incredibly optimistic” about the outcome of the lawsuit because they’re up against a “behemoth” in Mount Sinai, which can’t afford to back down on such a public case. But they’re determined to keep fighting, she says.

“What convinced us not to give up is from the day we filed in 2019 we’ve been approached by hundreds of women healthcare workers from Mount Sinai and other large academic and healthcare institutions in New York and across the US with similar stories about discrimination that go unaddressed and largely unseen, and when people speak out about them are finding themselves retaliated against.”

The plaintiffs set up Equity Now, which has helped support many of those other workers, and Anandaraja says she knows of subsequent discrimination cases against Mount Sinai that have “settled well”, though on a confidential basis. 

While the legal battle drags on, Equity Now succeeded in pushing for legislative changes in New York City introduced in 2021 that created a gender and race equity advisory board for the healthcare system as a watchdog to report back to the Department of Health, with recommendations on how to reduce incidents of discrimination and harassment. 

The group is now pushing for similar legislation at federal level and are seeking a senator to promote a bill that would mandate healthcare institutions to create and make public independent third-party reporting of discrimination complaints, and a mandated mutual arbitration system if someone is dissatisfied with the outcome of a complaint. 

“This is the work of years and we’re determined it not be just about our case,” says Anandaraja.