When we bring social entrepreneurs into our incubator, we see it as the starting point of a long journey: a journey defined by grit, determination and positive outcomes, year after year, even after their time in the incubator comes to an end. The long-term outcome of our incubator is that Change Leaders continue to scale their impact after they complete the program.
So what happened to the Change Leaders who have graduated from our programs? In 2017, we initiated follow-up on how our alumni developed after they completed our incubator program to find out:
Every social entrepreneur needs a strong foundation to grow their initiative into tangible, scalable impact. When we run innovation competitions, we often meet people with great ideas, but who aren’t quite ready for our Incubator program and need specialized support to help them get their ideas up-and-running. We never like to turn a strong idea away, which is why we run accelerators to help prospective social entrepreneurs transform their ideas into investment-ready initiatives. Our accelerators include a series of workshops, one-to-one support and "validation" time, when the entrepreneurs go back to the field to test their hypotheses and refine their solutions.
“The financial viability of a project is an aspect that is sometimes neglected by social entrepreneurs. The business model trainings that we received in the Accelerator allowed us to understand the importance of developing long-term, financially sustainable solutions and gave us the skills we needed to find solutions that can adapt to socio-economic realities of the environment in which we are working.”
- Khalid Fadoul, a 2016 Accelerator participant in Chad, who founded TECHNIDEV, a social enterprise that develops quality educational content that students can access using their mobile phones or computers. After completing the Accelerator, Khalid advanced into our Incubator program and is now one of six Change Leaders that we support in the country with our partner Tigo Chad.
The goal of our Incubator program is to help social entrepreneurs scale their organizations, maximize their social impact and leave us at the end of their early growth phase with robust, financially sustainable social enterprises in place. The social entrepreneurs in our Incubators - amazing people that we call Change Leaders - receive advice, trainings & expertise and access to global networks to help them along their journey and, often, a financial grant to support their early stage social enterprise.
Change Leaders spend anywhere from 1 to 5 years in the program and graduate as “alumni” when they have mastered the skills they need to scale, have financial sustainability, create lasting impact and effect system change. Graduates of our Incubators are experts in impact measurement and reporting, have already demonstrate meaningful social impact, have a financially sustainable business model and have documented the contributions their solution are making towards lasting system change.
“The incubator has helped us to increase our social impact.
With the required reports we send each quarter, this helps us to evaluate our activities and also to adjust how we monitor project activities. Now we see our organization as a true social enterprise with the monitoring and evaluation that we conduct for each planned activity.”
- Nhana Samba, Le Geste, Change Leader since 2015
Le Geste provides training and integration programs that allow hearing impaired children to
use digital tools for educational purposes. Le Geste visits special schools for
hearing-impaired children and provides software and tools that allow them to fully use the
internet, despite their impairment. Nhana was selected for our incubator program thanks to
support from our partner Millicom.
“The most import thing I learned during the Incubator is the power of networks.
Since my project is entirely focused on serving people, it only makes sense that one of the
primary objectives was to make as many people as possible involved. By connecting with other
social entrepreneurs, I learned how solutions can be customized to fit regional contexts.
Also, involving different stakeholders in the government and businesses helped me increase
impact and be involved in even larger roles.”
- Gaspard Twagirayesu, Creation Hill, Rwanda, Change Leader since 2014
Creation Hill is tackling the lack of science, technology, engineering and math programming
for students in Rwanda. They use trending technologies, fun experiments and technology-oriented
game to demystify STEM principles for kids and provide them with a foundation to become future
creators and innovators who will help develop Rwanda’s economy down the road.
“Reach for Change has helped us to strategize towards financial sustainability.
We have always largely relied on (foreign) project funding. Through the partnership with
Reach for Change, we have developed our thinking away from traditional not-for-profit
concepts, and are now actively working on alternative income streams linked to our expertise.
We are working on FonixGH, a learning-to-read method that meets learning needs of children
with learning difficulties. We have developed and validated the method, and are about to
launch the book edition onto the market. The next step will be to develop the electronic
edition to reach more and different users and to generate income for our social enterprise.”
- Margaretha Ubels and Ishmael Hammond, Special Attention Project, Ghana, Change Leaders since 2015
Special Attention Project improves the lives of children with learning difficulties through research, trainings and awareness campaigns, advocating for learning support in mainstream schools, and providing practical support to out-of-school children with learning difficulties. Margaretha and Ishmael are in our incubator program thanks to support from our partners, UNICEF, the EU and the Kavli Trust.
“Being in the Incubator has helped me develop a scalable model.
Before, I was just operating in one coding club, but now we have 21 coding clubs in Dar es
Salaam. This year, I spoke with my mentor at Reach for Change about the possibility of
franchising my social enterprise and got great feedback. This led me to apply for the
NEXTGEN franchising competition and because of the great influence and impact of the
Reach for Change Incubator, I was among the winners! Now I am looking into scaling Apps
and Girls across all of Tanzania and other African countries!”
- Carolyne Ekyarissima, Apps & Girls, Tanzania, Change Leader since 2013
Apps & Girls is working to bridge the gender gap in ICT in Tanzania and beyond. They run coding clubs in schools and organize workshops, exhibitions, hackathons, boot camps and competitions to empower girls to solve problems using ICT.
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