Joy Ndungutse is a renowned businesswoman and a naturally talented artist.  Joy was raised in a Ugandan refugee camp until her younger adult years. During her refugee life she saw firsthand how her mother and other mothers struggled to support their families without the basics. Her refugee lifestyle never left her mind and would later play a pivotal role in her career.

Ndungutse started learning how to weave at an early age from her mother and older sister-Josephine who dropped out of school to help take care of the growing family. The homemade baskets were then sold at the River Kagera resort where Joy’s father worked.  Income from the basket sales supplemented her father’s meager earnings as a guard at the resort.

Joy settled in Uganda where she was educated but later moved to Washington D.C where she worked for fifteen years, helping to found the Ugandan Women’s Effort to Save Orphans (UWESO) Washington Chapter.  As an adult and professional whose life had been shaped by her early years in a refugee camp, Joy made a commitment to pursue interests that would contribute to the development of less privileged women.

After the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, the country was faced with a challenge of widowed women, girl headed households and Orphans with no support system. Following the genocide in 1994, Joy returned home to Rwanda where she operated a hotel business. After leaving in Rwanda for many years, Joy embarked on her childhood dream to match her design talent with a traditional skill to empower rural women left hopeless after the genocide. In a small village called Gitarama in the Southern Province, under a tree this dream came to light when she invited 20 women, a group that has since grown to over 3000 women countrywide now called the Gahaya Links weavers.  Joy leveraged her design experience she acquired from her days in America and started teaching a few women how to weave for competitive international markets.

Today, she trains master weavers on new designs, basket shapes and fashion.  The Gahaya Links basket collection now competes on the International markets, attracting big retailers such as Macys in the U.S.A. Joy’s dream is realized everyday when she witnesses the tremendous change in the lives of the weavers and their families. She remains the company’s sole designer and enjoys coming up with innovative and creative designs for her products, as well as working with buyers to create designs to meet their clients taste.

Joy is a single mother of three, a girl and two boys. The family lives in Kigali, Rwanda. When Joy is not solving the weavers problems at Gahaya Links, she enjoys reading business development books and the company of friends, family and the weavers.