Small Foundation renews partnership with Village Capital
Small Foundation is pleased to announce a new phase of partnership with Village Capital which will seek to deepen understanding of the ecosystem of entrepreneur support organisations (ESOs) that work with rural-impacting enterprises (RIEs) in sub-Saharan Africa.
Village Capital is the largest organisation in the world supporting impact-driven, seed-stage start-ups led by founders with lived experience solving real-world problems in their regions. Operating in Africa since 2012, Village Capital is expanding its Africa practice with a focus on strengthening lives and livelihoods, as well as promoting circular agriculture.
Small Foundation first partnered with Village Capital in 2017 to support the expansion of its team in Africa and to launch an agricultural accelerator, Agriculture Africa 2019. Jointly supported by Ceniarth, Agriculture Africa 2019 worked with nine start-ups from seven countries across agricultural value chains. The peer-selected winners were:
- Ghana’s Complete Farmer, an end-to-end digital agricultural platform that that enables global industries to source agriculture commodities, grown to their specifications, using IoT, big data, and blockchain technology; and
- Nigeria’s ReelFruit, a premium dried fruit company known for its high-quality, nutritious snacks.
Building on Village Capital’s experience in supporting ESOs, our current partnership will:
- Customise their Abaca tool to landscape ESOs that work with RIEs
- Engage a cohort of ESOs in a research project to track their impact on rural-impacting enterprises
- Share learnings from the research to support further ecosystem-building efforts for ESOs that target RIEs
Small Foundation hopes this exciting partnership will help us identify opportunities to support the ESO ecosystem more effectively and lead to improved service delivery to RIEs. More information on eligibility to participate as an ESO research partner will be released in March. In the meantime, for more information please email Associate, Makena Odongo at makena.odongo@vilcap.com
