She built a gym where motherhood is part of the floor plan

Women move through the morning session in rhythm at AfroHeat Fitness in Addis Ababa. One finishes a set of kettlebell lifts. Another joins a strength class. A mother steps out briefly, disappears behind a side door and returns a few minutes later to continue her workout. The interruption is barely registered.

The room she has walked into has been built around the realities of women who want to exercise while managing work, family, and childcare.

It was the idea behind AfroHeat, a women-only fitness and wellness center founded in 2021 by Hamrawit Gizaw, a computer scientist turned fitness entrepreneur.

Hamrawit had started asking why so many women were not joining gyms. Some wanted to exercise but were uncomfortable in conventional fitness spaces. For mothers, finding someone to look after their children could make regular exercise difficult.

“I just wished it was better for me,” Hamrawit says. “Then I thought there must be other women who wish the same.”

Today, AfroHeat offers women-only fitness classes, personal training, and strength-focused workouts, alongside a children’s room where mothers can leave their babies and young children while they exercise. Mothers can also step away from a workout to breastfeed before returning to the gym floor.

“It’s a private space within a public space,” Hamrawit says.

Mahlet Kamariam, a gym enthusiast who has trained in multiple fitness facilities, says women-only spaces can remove some of the barriers women face in conventional gyms.

“A women-only gym creates a safe space,” Mahlet says. “There’s no body shaming. It’s not intimidating in the way a co-ed gym can be.”

She says gyms designed specifically for women can also increase participation because classes, trainers, and schedules are built around women’s needs.

“The classes are targeted for women’s training, and they’re trained by women,” she says. “I think other gyms also need to be mindful that women’s bodies are different and we need different types of exercise.”

The model addresses a wider gap in physical activity. The World Health Organization’s 2024 assessment found that women remained consistently less likely than men to meet recommended physical activity levels.

WHO country estimates show the gap can be substantial: in South Africa, 43% of adult women are sufficiently physically active compared with 58% of men. In Kenya, the figures are 79% for women and 83% for men, while Nigeria records 76% for women and 79% for men.

The idea of an all-female gym grew from Hamrawit’s own experience. Long before she became a fitness entrepreneur, she was a computer science student in Minnesota. She grew up in a household where education came first and activities outside school were often treated as distractions.

“The expectation was actually against all of that,” she says. “It was school, school, school, school, school.”

Movement entered her life unexpectedly. At university, she became close to a small group of African students from countries including Zimbabwe, Cameroon, Nigeria, Ghana, and Ethiopia. Together they prepared dance performances for cultural events, and through Afrobeats she discovered what she describes as a passion for movement.

“When I moved back to Ethiopia, I realized I had a skill,” she says. “I loved movement and I had this passion for dance, but I didn’t know what to do with it.”

In 2018, the same year she returned to Ethiopia, she began offering free, women-only dance fitness classes. The first official class attracted 22 women. The next drew just three, two of them her friends.

Still, she kept going, teaching dance classes while building a following through social media videos. In 2020, she became a certified personal trainer and began coaching clients in their homes. Eventually, she converted her own backyard into a small training space.

Three women became six. Six became 50. Soon, the neighborhood was overwhelmed with parked cars, and Hamrawit had to find a larger facility. To secure the lease, she asked her existing members to pay six months upfront.

“They were basically my first investors.”

But establishing the larger gym brought new pressures. Structural repairs, rent, staff salaries, and unexpected maintenance costs strained the business. When schools closed for summer, many mothers also stopped attending because their children were at home.

“I genuinely did not know how we would survive the next month,” she says.

Family loans helped keep the business alive. More importantly, the women who stopped coming revealed a problem she could not solve simply by adding more classes.

“When mothers told me they had no one to look after their children, I thought there must be something we can change,” she says.

Selamawit Alemu, AfroHeat’s gym floor manager and a personal trainer, sees those barriers every day. Many of the women coming through the doors are trying to balance work, family responsibilities, and caregiving at the same time.

“For mothers, exercising with children is a very difficult thing. Leaving a child to work out is hard. For example, yesterday I had a client who gave birth eight months ago, and as it happened, she needed to breastfeed in between. Since there is a childcare area here, she went and breastfed for 15 minutes, then returned and continued working out. Because such situations exist, and it is something missing in many gyms, we felt these kinds of solutions should be created, Salamawit said.”

AfroHeat provides a separate children’s area where mothers who do not have nannies or other childcare support can bring their children while working out. Instead of having to choose between caring for a child and taking time for herself, a mother can bring her child, leave them in the children’s area, and participate in a fitness session while knowing they are nearby and being cared for.

For Hamrawit, the solution has also been about the women who work inside AfroHeat. The business operates with an all-women team and has policies that acknowledge issues such as menstrual pain, emotional stress and the realities women bring into professional environments.

“This isn’t only about members,” she says. “It’s also about my team.”

The space later became part of a wider mothers’ wellness circle focused on postpartum recovery, breastfeeding, pelvic floor strength and rebuilding physical confidence after childbirth.

One employee, Frehiwot Shita, joined as an accountant and administrator. Hamrawit noticed that she learned movement quickly and encouraged her to consider fitness as a profession.

“I don’t think she had ever considered that fitness could be a career.”

AfroHeat sponsored Frehiwot’s international certification, and she became a qualified trainer.

Hamrawit now wants AfroHeat to expand into East African markets such as Kenya and Rwanda while making fitness education and certification more accessible to women.

“Fitness is still a very male-dominated industry,” she says. “Fitness education, certifications, and online education should be much more available for women who are looking to explore fitness as a career option.”

For Hamrawit, AfroHeat is ultimately about more than exercise.

“I want AfroHeat to break that shackle for women,” she says. “I want women to think, ‘If I can start a fitness journey when I never thought fitness was for me, maybe I can also leave this toxic situation. Maybe I can also pursue the career I want. Maybe I can also choose a different life.’