Bridging the Gap: Insights into the Support Ecosystem for Rural Impacting Enterprises in sub-Saharan Africa

Rural impacting enterprises (RIEs) are essential to the economic development of most African countries, where over 60% of the population lives in rural areas. In 2022, Village Capital and Small Foundation launched a research initiative to deepen understanding of the RIE support ecosystem in sub-Saharan Africa.

Bridging the Gap – Insights into the Support Ecosystem for Rural Impacting Enterprises in sub-Saharan Africa is the culmination of two years of research involving data from 359 entrepreneur support organisations (ESOs) identified as supporting RIEs in sub-Saharan Africa, with 19 of these selected as research partners. The report provides an in-depth analysis of the current landscape, identifying the critical support ESOs offer to RIEs as well as gaps and opportunities.

The research included development of an ESO diagnostic tool. This self-awareness tool is designed to guide ESOs to assess their capabilities and identify key milestones to build a financially sustainable organisation that delivers impact to entrepreneurs. This work was also influenced by Argidius’ Foundation SCALE framework.

Small Foundation wishes to highlight three key insights:

1. There is a dynamic local ESO ecosystem providing a broad range of services to RIEs across sub-Saharan Africa. These ESOs are often best placed to meet the needs of RIEs but are under the radar of many funders.
2. Local ESOs deliver strong outcomes for RIEs despite operating with relatively low budgets. 80% of ESOs in the dataset operate on annual budgets of less than USD 500K.
3. Local ESOs have a broad range of strategies to generate income but require more funding to support core operations to expand their own capabilities, beyond programmatic funding.

Small Foundation believes the pathway to sustainability and scale for RIEs is to strengthen this diverse ecosystem of ESOs. This will require more coordination and collaboration between ESOs, financial service providers and other stakeholders to meet the varied needs of RIEs.

Going forward, we will focus on supporting more local ESOs to strengthen their capacity to deliver high quality services to RIEs and to build sustainable organisations. We also commit to engaging with other stakeholders to improve coordination for enterprise support in local communities.

Small Foundation welcomes feedback on how we can best collaborate towards a thriving enterprise support ecosystem. Please reach out to gerardwynne@smallfoundation.ie for further discussion.

See the full text, executive summary and the sub-report outlining the scope and methodology. We encourage readers to delve into the full methodology and utilise the open-sourced diagnostic tools provided.