Academy for Women Entrepreneurs (AWE) alumna, Chef Chanté Basden, is passionate about two things: food and her community. While baking mouth-watering guava cream cheese danishes that sell out daily at Bahamas Tastiest Bakery, she also leads the fight for women’s empowerment and food stability on her island, Abaco, in The Bahamas.
From a young age, Chanté was in the kitchen. “My passion ignited when I would cook with my grandma on Sundays,” she says. “I would just keep learning and learning. I realized that I love the kitchen.” Many years later, after culinary school in the United States, Chanté took over her family’s bakery, Bahamas Tastiest.
Bahamas Tastiest’s White Bread
In 2019, Hurricane Dorian hit Abaco, destroying much of the island. Chanté recounts walking into her family bakery and seeing everything destroyed. But she was resilient. “Instead of allowing that to defeat me,” she remembers, “I thought, ‘Chanté, you're bigger than this storm.’” Chanté resolved to restore her bakery and use this storm for good.
Chanté explains that Hurricane Dorian provided her with an opportunity to act on her long-standing passion for food stability in the community. As the storm approached, Chanté stayed in the bakery, distributing bread until the final minute. This was only the beginning of her efforts to fight hunger in Abaco.
Today, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and the rising cost of living on her island, poverty and food instability are pressing issues. Chanté constantly leverages her bakery to educate her community about simple, cost-effective recipes, empowering people to produce their own food. She even started a fund to provide hungry people with free food items.
Chanté is teaching her community how to make basic bread dough to fight hunger and provide a cost-effective food source.
Beyond these efforts, Chanté launched a second business, The Chef Store, that serves as her platform for educating and empowering young women. The store, which provides ingredients and supplies to restaurants and chefs, is run by a fully female team that Chanté carefully instructs on the important aspects of running a business.
Her ability to empower the next generation of female business owners is in large part due to her participation in the U.S. State Department’s Academy for Women Entrepreneurs (AWE) program. Through AWE, Chanté learned the importance of a business plan and today reminds her employees, “If you don't have a plan, you plan to fail!”
As she looks forward to selling her products internationally to major chain stores, Chanté is grateful for how her AWE cohort inspired her and how the DreamBuilder program equipped her for expansion. “Once you've completed the AWE program, it's like you're set for life,” she describes. “It's an investment in you.”
The Academy for Women Entrepreneurs, a program of the U.S. Department of State, gives women the knowledge, networks, and access they need to launch and scale successful businesses. To date, U.S. Embassy Nassau has empowered more than 280 women in The Bahamas, and forged partnerships with several local institutions to support female entrepreneurship over the long term: the Small Business Development Centre (SBDC), the Bahamas Chamber of Commerce and Employers Confederation (BCCEC) and the Bahamas Development Bank (BDB) have all contributed to making the AWE program possible in The Bahamas.
Academy for Women Entrepreneurs (AWE)
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