Week 8

The week began with planning and coordination of the first of the 5 workshops  of the Village Capital Program, which was to take place from the 10^th to the 12^th of August.

We confirmed the participation of the mentors and the 18 participants in the program. The program began with an inspirational speech about how Leadership transforms organizations, followed by the mentor mentee speed dating. There was an Introduction of GrowthAfica’s proprietary tool (called Value Compass™) to the participants. We concluded the the workshop with mapping exercises intended to probe for a comprehensive overview of the current state of the startups.  After the session, the team met to give feedback on the entire workshop and highlight areas that would need improvement in subsequent workshops.

I rounded off my internship at GrowthAfrica/Village Capital after setting Village program Nairobi in motion by sourcing for 67 Entrepreneurs, evaluated and selected 18 of the investible enterprises to participate in the program, recruited 11 mentors that will help entrepreneurs implement the action points that will be identified in the five workshops, planned and coordinated the 1^ST of the 6 workshops.

The 1st Village Capital Program Seminar and Conclusion of My Internship

Week 6 &7

I started my week with a meeting to deliberate over the 28 semi finalists and evaluated their performances based on the group interview sessions, Pitch Fest and  ratings from the investors that came during the mock pitch fest. We finally selected the 18 participants that qualified to participate in the program.

The enterprises we selected are from the following sectors:  software/game development /mobile money payment, health and water purification, clean energy, food and leather processing.

My team was able to recruit 11 mentors to participate in the program. The mentorship component is meant to strengthen the participant’s ability to implement the action points that will be identified in the first 5 of the 6 workshops.

The week was concluded with site visits to the Entrepreneurs at their places of work. W were able to meet some team members of certain enterprises we had not met before and we also got to vet the company registration documents such as the certificate for incorporation, memorandum of organization and tax certificates.

Selection of 18 Participants for the Vilcap Program and Site Visits to the Enterprises

Week 5

The team began the week with a meeting to deliberate on the evaluations we were able to carry out on the enterprises via the interview sessions in week 4.  Based on our deliberation, we collectively reduced the pool of applicants to 28 semi finalists.  The team contacted the successful applicants and invited them over for a pitch fest and group interviews. I wrote a report on the 28-semi finalist to get a clearer sense of their strengths and weaknesses.

The pitch fests helped expose applicants to pitching their businesses to potential investors and prepare them ahead for the final pitch fest in November.

Pictures 1&2: Pitch fest

We ended the week with the group interview sessions. This gave us a clearer sense of the group dynamics of the entrepreneurs since the village capital program is based on group interaction of the final 15 entrepreneurs who will be responsible for conducting due diligence on the enterprises in the program and at the end decide the 2 winners of the $100,000 investment.

Week 4

My goals for the week were to help select the 40 quarter finalists and conduct interview sessions for 13 of them. I contacted and set up convenient dates for the interviews. This was intended to get a deeper knowledge of the enterprises. The 13 enterprises cross-examined were from diverse sectors such as mobile applications, software development, agri processing, green energy, footwear design and production.

The evaluation of the enterprises was based on the value compass developed to prob for leadership values, values proposition, value generation, value delivery and value management.

At the end of the week, our team  had been able to get better and deeper understanding of the enterprises.

It is my 3^rd week in Nairobi and I realized the only place I knew was Kilimani (west central of Nairobi), the county where my Office  and my house is located. I decided to explore the city with two of my FMS buds, Catharine and Jonathan. We took a tour round downtown Nairobi.

I started the  week with the enthusiasm that we had reached and exceeded our goal of the number of applications we aimed to receive for the program. We started evaluating the quality of the entrepreneurs in our pipeline and we felt we might need to get more stronger applicants into the program. The team tried contacting some of these applicants that had participated in the information sessions or that we had earlier contacted but had not applied. We encouraged them to turn in their applications. Some of them did and other did not for reasons best known to them.

Now that we have the pipeline of entrepreneurs sorted out, the team moved on to start looking into recruiting investors and mentors that will be willing to commit their time and expertise to the program for free. In my opinion, I think this might be quite a challenge because the culture of giving back once time for free is still quite foreign. So far we have succeeded in drawing up a list of potential individuals we think might be a good fit. In the coming week we will contact and hope to convince them to take part in the program.

We rounded off the week by moving to the evaluation phase. I was responsible for evaluating 42 of the applications we had received. This process is aimed at evaluating the enterprises based on certain criteria we had developed to help reduce the volume of applications  to the top 40 semi finalists. I  enjoyed getting to know more about these enterprises  through their applications some have really interesting and innovative start-ups that has started generating revenue but hasn’t broken even, some have very promising ideas/concepts  which are about to be  piloted and the remaining applicants  still have a very long way to go.

WEEK 2:

I reflected on the ways we had been sourcing which was mostly reaching out to entrepreneurs that had previously participated in Innovative entrepreneurial competitions that had taken place in Nairobi and following up on those GrowthAfrica had earlier contacted.

I came up with some additional ideas that I thought might help us increase the rate of application in order to meet our target of recruiting at least 40 entrepreneurs for the program. First, I contacted Universities in Nairobi informing them about our program and requested that they inform their students about the Vilcap program. I designed Posters to put up on University campuses and public places and researched about the cost of placing advertisement in the daily newspaper. I quickly realized that my suggestion to pursue advertisement was not really welcomed by the GrowthAfrica team. I was surprised to later find out that the reason for the reluctance was that there had not been any budget set aside for this purpose.

We decided to focus on facilitating three more information sessions, advertising via social media(Facebook, Tweeter and LinkedIn). By the end of the second week the attendance had increased to over 72 participants. All along, the GrowthAfrica team laid emphasis on the fact that most entrepreneurs will turn in their applications on or a day before the application deadline.  I was still quite skeptical and kept pushing for advertisement in order to get the word out to a wider audience. But to my total surprise applications started flowing in a day before the deadline and all up until midnight of the deadline. We not only met our target of 40 applicants we exceeded it! We have received 61 applications  and  we are still counting.

WEEK 1

After the intense two weeks Frontier Market Scout training in Monterey, I set out on my field trip and arrived safely in Kenya only to realize that my bags didn’t arrive with me. I was fortunate to have a few clothes in my hand luggage, which I tried to manage until my bags eventually arrived three days later.

I went straight into sourcing for entrepreneurs for the Village Capital Program since that was the core of my assignment. Before I go further here is a quick introduction about GrowthAfica, the partner organization I work with here in Nairobi. The organization was founded in 2002 and it has 6 major entities. The growthhub, where I work is the 6^th newest entity that was opened about three weeks ago. It is an incubator and accelerator for start-ups and early stage enterprises.

Picture 1: Information Session @ The Growthhub.

Picture 2: Information Session @ the ihub

My team comprised of   Patricia and Johnni- co-founders of GrowthAfrica,  Grace- the Programs Coordinator, Jonathan-Fellow Frontier Market Scout and I.  In the first week we organized 4 information sessions at the newly opened Growthhub and at the ihub, another incubation center.

At the end of the first week, we had been able to source for 57 entrepreneurs to attend the sessions. I was quite impressed about our success of getting this amount of participants in a week but the fact that we had only received 7 applications made everyone on the team so uncomfortable and we all departed for the weekend with the thought of devising more effective ways of  getting more people to apply.

Quite honestly I must tell you that I have consciously hesitated for a while before deciding to start writing this blog. Basically because I do not consider myself a prolific writer to keep readers spell bound to my blog. Once I got over this silly thought I decided to just write and let you decide whether you will read or not.

First of all I would like to let you know a little bit about my interest in International development and how I stumble on the field of impact investing.  While I was in college studying computer science, I realized that I was always drawn to community development projects I took part in on campus. So when I concluded my bachelors, I decided  to pursue a career in International development which I thought will enable me help alleviate poverty on a global scale. As for impact investing, I pretty much stumbled on it while I was researching for my summer internship earlier this winter. I applied to the Frontier Market Scout program just as a back up plan in case all my other fancy options didn’t work out.

Taking part in the Frontier Market Scout program turned out to be one of the best decisions I have made in awhile. Being an antagonist of foreign aid because of the dependency problem it creates for developing nations, it was entirely fascinating for me to learn about impact investing which helps create economic opportunity for  people and at the same time generate returns for investors. This is one the ways I believe sustainable development could be achieved.