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A Greener Future for East Africa’s Youth
1) StartNow
Our StartNow online platform is used as support for the training of social business entrepreneurs. The aspiring entrepreneurs interact on a self-learning platform and build their business plan within 8 weeks. The objective is to blend online-offline experiences for the entrepreneurs to advance on the creation and testing of their business plans, as well as providing them with tools to track their progress after finalizing the self-learning experience. The process is accompanied by weekly mentoring sessions to provide constant feedback. When the mentees finalize the online course, they become part of the mentorship pool to help other social business entrepreneurs to grow
The StartNow online course for social business plan creation will allow the entrepreneurs to build:
• The theory of change for their social business solution
• Identify their stakeholders and build their value proposition
• Build their product and market strategy
• Build their revenue model, review its financial viability and projections
• Measure their social and environmental impact potential including their potential to create local jobs
Do you want to join as a volunteer mentor?
If you have experience in creating social business plans and would like to support aspiring social business entrepreneurs to growth and bring more social and environmental change, you can join our pool of mentors. The mentors will be assigned according to their experience and will require 2-hours per week to support their mentees.
Sign Up as a Social Business Entrepreneur or as part of our mentors’ pool
2) GrowUp
Through our GrowUp Incubator we focus on providing key support to green social business entrepreneurs in post-revenue stage.
Incubatees will be able to meet peers and mentors to share challenges and discover solutions that propel them forward. The Incubatees receive tailored mentorship based on their needs, interactive capacity building workshops and networking opportunities with local partners and peer-to-peer support. At the end, the incubatee will have identified how to:
• Refine its partnerships and operational model
• Identify financial sustainability model and financial opportunities
• Analyse the product-market fit for multiple contexts
• Find viable routes to scale and grow
• Integrate impact evaluation into the operational model
The 2021 cohort of our GrowUp Incubator will focus on supporting and advancing innovative solutions for sustainable waste management that have the potential to create substantial social and environmental impact. In the coming years we will open cohorts focused on further environmental topics.
2021 Cohort: Waste Management from February – October, 2021
3) Zero Plastic Waste Cities – East Africa
The goal of this program is to close the loop on plastic waste collection and recycling in cities and creating a circular economy that is inclusive and social for all. We are conducting feasibility studies on plastic waste leakage, job creation potential and social business solution based on the modular approach of the Zero Plastic Waste City program developed by YEH. The activities include expert and user interviews, stakeholder workshops, market research and ideation sessions. Four cities have been identified: Nairobi and Mombasa in Kenya and Addis Ababa and Bahir Darin, Ethiopia. We will create social business plans and identify investment needs to improve municipal waste management in those four East African Cities.
