Clean beauty

Brighton businesswoman Monica Norley is empowering Ugandan women with albinism by teaching them the skills she learnt from building her Visionary Soap Company

- Crystal Skinner

For American-born Monica Norley, home is an old Dutch barge in Brighton Marina where she lives with three pets – two chocolate brown Labradors and a wise old cat. But Monica’s professional life has taken her all over the world. She has lived in Sussex since 2004 – mostly in Brighton, with a six-year period in Hastings from where she ran the award-winning Visionary Soap Company. Her current project is the Mama Mzungu beauty brand, a soap company providing employment to women with albinism which necessitates regular travel to Africa.

Monica first became interested in female economic and social development while on a business placement with the US Peace Corps in Guatemala, back in 1995. She worked there for two years, volunteering within an indigenous community in San Miguel Chicaj after graduating in Business at Eastern Washington University. Here, she met women making textiles for pennies a day, and became aware that the international male sellers were receiving a much larger cut.

“I learnt very quickly that working with the women in undeveloped regions meant that the income would go directly back to the household,” says Monica. She felt that if she could support women in developing countries to start and run businesses of their own, she could help bring economic strength and positive social change to these areas of poverty.