Promise Hub

The Sustainable Development Goals Report of 2019 points out that 8,6% of the world’s population lives in extreme poverty. In Sub-Saharan Africa, however,  the proportion is 40%. In this part of the world, millions live on less than $1.90/day, many of them also hold or seek refugee status due to war, poverty, persecution, and climate change.

Promise Hub is a start-up incubator that migrates opportunities to empower social entrepreneurship among vulnerable communities around the globe. We leverage an entrepreneurship curriculum, local mentors, a physical hub, online marketplace, shipping service, and digital wallet to create a unique infrastructure for entrepreneurial success.

 Establishing Promise Hub in developing regions around the globe creates entrepreneurial communities capable of joining the global marketplace. The poorest places on earth would have access to all the know-how, tools, skills and support needed to launch successful businesses, create local jobs, and increase local incomes. 

In 2015, the World Bank estimated that over 700 million people live on less than $1.90/day. 

There are many factors contributing to extreme poverty persisting in the world: Inequality and persecution, conflicts, lack of opportunities and education, hunger, climate change, poor infrastructure, poor access to water, sanitation, and healthcare. 

The issue with many of the factors contributing to extreme poverty is profoundly interconnected - addressing one or more has a profound impact on the others as well. While migration itself would aid a few (though oftentimes not) it would still leave the systemic factors that created it unaddressed. 

A large number of those affected by extreme poverty are concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa. With so many finding themselves with no realistic opportunities close to home, migrating abroad to seek opportunities is often perceived as the best option. 

Over the last 70 years, migrants from 8 nearby countries have traveled to Nakivale Refugee Settlement, Uganda, the location of our first Hub, in order to save their lives, and find opportunities. With a local unemployment rate of over 90%, it is understandable why many of its 110,000 inhabitants would see resettlement as their best chance for a better life. 

We launched our pilot Hub in April 2019 in Nakivale Refugee Settlement, Uganda. It is set up to be an ‘open learning environment’ to advance social entrepreneurship. To this end we make a holistic infrastructure of tools available to be used for free by aspiring entrepreneurs called “Game Changers”:

-Blended learning curriculum on Project & Business Management, Leadership, Entrepreneurship, and E-commerce. The online components are hosted on the Funzi platform and are further explored and disseminated by our Local Impact Team through group and individual workshops and assignments. 

-Local Impact Team- experts, change-makers, and leaders drawn from the local community. Trained in workshop facilitation and coaching, they provide guidance, support, and expertise towards the creation of successful businesses. They also organize upskilling events and lead workshops on trauma healing, the SDGs, personal development, and teamwork.

-Our Online Marketplace: a platform where they can showcase their products and services

-Our Shipping Service: the first post office in Nakivale, our strategic partnership with MyMalls/DHL allows products to reach customers globally within 96 hours

-Our Digital Wallet: a financial tool that allows users to transfer and receive money directly from customers – access to financial inclusion for the unbanked.

We establish Hubs in impoverished communities, find ambitious individuals that either have or want to discover a talent, empower them with all the tools our infrastructure can offer, and support them in becoming successful entrepreneurs. These game-changing entrepreneurs are capable of migrating opportunities locally and can thus uplift their entire community by creating fulfilling jobs for fellow residents.  

We begin by journeying to communities with large numbers of people living in extreme poverty and interviewing residents. We inquire about living conditions, opportunities, perceptions, and leaders. We seek established leaders in these places that have the vision and will to lead their communities from poverty towards prosperity and invite them to join Promise Hub. We rely on these local leaders to represent Promise Hub, adapt, and implement all of our unique tools and support structure to local needs. They manage everything from forming local impact teams, operating the Hub, onboarding aspiring entrepreneurs to our shipment service, financial inclusion services, and online marketplace in order to create successful Game Changers.

Extreme poverty has been halved throughout the past 30 years - yet it has persisted in the most vulnerable places in the world. While some leave, seeking better opportunities, the systemic causes of poverty remain and further generate new victims of poverty.

Our model is designed to uplift the most vulnerable of communities by introducing tools, know-how, and support and adapting them to local realities and needs alongside community members.

We demonstrate that with the right tools and encouragement, marginalized groups can self-organize and dynamically seek solutions to achieve financial success, create local jobs, and raise living standards. 

Since we focus on poverty alleviation through facilitating business and job creation, the most similar initiatives would be Endeavor and Kiva. 

Endeavor has an excellent support infrastructure, ranging from seed-funding to networking opportunities for high-impact entrepreneurship. They search for and support promising start-ups that are likely to “solve real problems at significant scale”.

Kiva crowdfunds loans for underserved communities for things such as launching businesses and investing in new equipment. 

We have great admiration for these organizations and their impact.

However, unlike Endeavor, we do not only choose aspiring entrepreneurs that have the will, know-how, or idea that can disrupt industries - many of our Game Changers have said they would be satisfied as small-business owners who personally craft products.And unlike Kiva, we do not only offer loans for business launch and growth.

We provide a holistic infrastructure to our Game Changers that includes:

-skills development through our curriculum, digital literacy workshops,  face-to-face as well as online mentoring;

-Learning resources and tools appropriate for businesses ranging from artisan to digital products

-The means and know-how to access international markets as well as broaden local reach

-Access to essential financial tools

We support entrepreneurial success in communities where things such as the internet, banking, and infrastructure are perceived as luxuries by making them freely available. We implement a human-centric approach that co-creates sustainable businesses together with the entrepreneurs and generates well-paying jobs to uplift entire communities rather than a few ambitious individuals.

Our core business model is based around Game Changers being able to showcase their products and services on our online marketplace: https://promisehubcollective.com. Customers can filter by product, vendors, and more - each product clearly illustrates the Game Changer who created it, and each individual profile describes their start-up idea. Physical products are shipped through https://www.promisehubexpress.com, thanks to our partnership with MyMalls/DHL, anywhere in the world within 96 hours. This is necessary since our target communities, including Nakivale, often lack postal or shipment services. 

Residents of underprivileged communities are almost universally unbanked due to ineffective bureaucracy, poor infrastructure, an underdeveloped business environment, or a mixture of these-our Digital Wallet addresses it. 

When a customer makes an online purchase from Promise Hub Collective, the money is uploaded to the digital wallet of the seller and gives access to their revenue via mobile money at any local mobile money kiosk. By eliminating the need for intermediaries, Game Changers are the sole owners of their success and the gap between the unbanked and the global financial system is closed. Our Digital Wallet is set to launch in Q4 2020. 

While we do value our offline learning interventions (mentoring, breakout groups, and workshops), we rely on our online curriculum, powered by Funzi to help pave the way for further essential digital skill development. Thanks to greater familiarity and comfort with smartphones among Game Changers, bite-sized content structure, and ease-of-access we could not have asked for a better partner for our digital learning interventions. 

Our marketplace, Promise Hub Collective, is a fairly common e-commerce site. We have a dedicated team in Nakivale charged with media, quality assurance, marketplace maintenance, and product descriptions-the latter will pass onto individual Game Changers once the platform is optimized and they develop digital literacy.

Promise Hub Express is a shipping service that makes postal services in Nakivale possible for the first time. Through our partner MyMalls, we are plugged into DHL’s logistic infrastructure and have all of the necessary shipping documentation and materials necessary right at the Hub. Shipments have so far gone out towards the US, Canada, and Germany and have arrived within 96 hours.   

Our digital wallet functions similarly to a virtual bank account. Whenever a purchase is processed by Promise Hub Collective, it automatically retains a small percentage and then sends the rest of the amount to the unique wallet of the product creator/Game Changer within seconds. The Game Changer can then collect that money at any Mobile Money kiosk in Uganda. While the Digital Wallet is ready to launch we are waiting for Mobile Money to integrate it into their service. 

The Funzi web app is designed for mobile users, accessible with an Internet-connected device at www.funzi.mobi. Its bite-sized learning content is optimized for quick and easy consumption on mobile. Existing learning content is adapted for mobile pedagogy and gamified for fun and practical mobile learning. A brief demo of Funzi’s platform can be seen here. 

Activities

Access to stable internet, smart devices, and e-learning resources ensure Game Changers with the assistance and encouragement of our mentors to gain insights on local challenges and potential entrepreneurial solutions. Online learning is augmented with workshops on essential topics (entrepreneurship, budgeting, project & team management, strategy, digital literacy), as well as on relevant niche skills (handicrafts, art, programming). 

Frequent recurring feedback sessions, individual mentoring,  access to tools in order to develop skills or products are organized around flexible schedules.

Outputs

Game Changers demonstrate acquired knowledge and skills by pitching products and business models to peers and mentors for feedback. They graduate the core entrepreneurship curriculum of Promise Hub and create commercially viable products and optimize the product development process to plan for their start-up to profitably include employees over time. 

Stimulating entrepreneurship has been a popular tool for poverty alleviation for quite some time and its effectiveness has been pointed out throughout numerous academic papers, such as Entrepreneurship training and education as strategic tools for poverty alleviation in Nigeria.

Short-term Outcomes

Start-ups centered around well-researched niches and expertise are founded within the community. They achieve self-sustainability within 6 months and steadily grow by increasing team size and investing in new equipment. They demonstrate social-mindedness, have well-structured employee engagement procedures and support positive community-oriented initiatives with funding, materials, mentoring, or a mixture of these.  

Employee engagement is important for a company’s success (as illustrated in this Forbes article) and community buy-in is essential for fostering an entrepreneurial ecosystem, sourcing quality employees and benefiting from community support in difficult periods (as illustrated in Building Entrepreneurial Ecosystems in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Quintuple Helix Model).

Long-term Outcomes

More and more start-ups transition into successful established businesses, expanding to over 500 employees and areas outside the immediate community. These companies and their employees help strengthen shared prosperity principles within the collective mindset of the community, invest and support community improvement initiatives and raise the overall quality of life through social projects, job creation, investments. 

Our main focus is to create and empower successful entrepreneurs capable of supporting themselves and their families so these are the numbers we will showcase. While many of our Game Changers want to grow their initiative into a business and employ others, only one has successfully done so (team of 12) - we cannot yet estimate how many others will employ how many within a span of time. We also organize women’s empowerment workshops and events (our last one numbered over 1200 attendees) in order to foster understanding and acceptance of women entrepreneurs within the community - this will also not be counted as it does not directly create entrepreneurs or support families.

We shall count the number of Game Changers who have graduated or are attending the curriculum and are launching their businesses (workshops currently suspended due to Covid-19) and the average 4.6 dependents who are supported through their activities as people who are significantly impacted by our solution:

-June 2020: 62 Game Changers and 285 dependents

-June 2021: 132 Game Changers and 607 dependents

-June 2025: 852 Game Changers and 3919 dependents

We plan to support the entrepreneurial endeavors of our Game Changers in Nakivale Refugee Settlement by expanding the tools, curriculum, and network of mentors in diverse fields so that they have an even broader selection of career opportunities. We seek strategic partners to contribute with products, prototypes, and resources that would further augment our efforts and help uplift the community. We are also formalizing our seed funding and loan processes to also help them jumpstart their start-ups. As unemployment within Nakivale’s stats at over 90% we aim to reduce this by at least a third within 5 years through our Game Changer’s businesses. 

Also within this timeframe, we believe that our poverty-alleviation through entrepreneurial-development methodology will be validated to an extent to which we seek partners to establish Promise Hubs in more locations around the world. 

Capacity

We see ourselves as one small iteration of a holistic solution to poverty alleviation. We seek to accomplish our mission as effectively as possible and are open to attract as many co-creators and collaborators to maximize our impact. 

Finances

We plan for Promise Hub Nakivale to achieve financial self-sustainability within 5 years of establishment. Ensuring Promise Hub’s local and global team’s financial stability is an ongoing activity that needs to be addressed until 2024, according to our estimates.   

Technical aspects

Nakivale experiences relatively frequent power outages (roughly 180 hours’ worth per month). 

Culture

Cultural differences and differing values systems are at the forefront of activities - misunderstandings, while rare have the potential to push back deadlines.

Market

Much of the Hub’s financial resilience leans on the success of the online marketplace as a source of funds for both individual Game Changers as well as the Hub itself. Reaching target audiences and obtaining sales will be essential for our success.

Capacity

We actively seek potential partners throughout our individual networks, for all areas where we have identified local solutions to local challenges.

Finances

We aim for Promise Hub Collective sales to become the main source of funding for Promise Hub as a whole in time, and so dedicate much of our efforts towards optimizing it. We dedicate 40 total work hours per month towards grant applications and we also actively seek partners to fill this gap. 

Technical aspects

We are looking to implement solar panels in order to complement the underground high-voltage cables and generators we currently make use of.

Culture

Our tools and know-how are intended to be adapted to local needs and so we co-create workshop themes with the Local Impact Team, LIT. LIT members are those who deliver the workshops and can assess methodologies for local use. Nakivale provides us with a wealth of insights and we aim to maintain the same type of cooperative approach in all subsequent Hubs.

Market

We have a partnership with Grounded World to work out our marketing strategy. This will be defined in Q4 2020.

Full-time staff: 15 (Local Impact Team), 2 (Global Team)

Project staff: 3

Leadership (unpaid): 2 (founders and senior advisors), 12 (advisory board members)

Volunteer staff (unpaid): 3

Promise Hub is made up of our local impact team, our global team, our advisory board, and various volunteers each mobilizing their knowledge and skills to further our mission.

The Local Impact Team adapts and develops workshops, initiates local projects, manages day-to-day operations, mentors Game Changers, and curates insights. As a principle, Local Impact Team Members are exclusively formed by local community members and change-makers. They leverage their unique familiarity with their community’s needs and potential to maximize the Hub’s impact. All have been trained in workshop design and facilitation, and each has a proven track record in various essential skills such as leadership, project management, team coordination, agri-businesses, empowerment, accounting, public health, and computer sciences. Our team in Uganda numbers twelve such individuals. 

-Patrick Muvunga - CEO of Promise Hub Nakivale. With a background in mechanical engineering and architecture, Patrick has participated in, mentored and led several projects in Nakivale: founding NakivART- a project that showcases and supports local artwork, designing and managing the Uhuru Amphitheater – a place which host weekly concerts and talent shows for free and founding Opportuniggee – a refugee training organization are just a few of his achievements.

The Global Team is tasked with strategy, partnerships, and broader projects. Our global team has decades’ worth of experience in e-commerce, project and people management, facilitation, and entrepreneurship. 

The Advisory Board is made up of global experts, innovators that mobilize their experience and networks to support our technical, strategic, and mentoring capabilities. 

-Funzi hosts our online curriculum and offers technical support in expanding it

-MyMalls and DHL power our worldwide shipping

-Blinkist supplies our team and Game Changers with an excellent online platform of summaries of nonfiction books 

-Grounded World - Marketing Strategy

-Opportunigee is the world’s first self-organized social entrepreneurship hub within a refugee settlement. Refugees are creating their own opportunities. It is a self-organized project of refugees by refugees designed to be a projects incubator in the settlement. They help us locally source mentors, Game Changers, and temporary project staff members. They also greatly aid in several projects’ implementation in Nakivale.

There are hundreds of villages and cities throughout the world in which people lack opportunities and means to support themselves. Based on our experience and research in Nakivale as well as previous professional experiences we realize that many residents of communities facing extreme poverty would much prefer opportunities to uplift themselves rather than handouts. 

We offer these individuals the means to learn, showcase, sell, ship, and profit from their entrepreneurial endeavors. 

Customers can support entrepreneurs in underserved communities and receive high-quality handmade items. They can communicate directly with the Game Changer who designs and creates the products and will often be able to ask for custom items. It is a system in which customers will be able to have a direct line of communication with the beneficiaries of this fair trade agreement. Customers can rest assured that the product creators benefit most from purchases thanks to the Digital Wallet, and can be sure of excellent shipping services as the locals are the first link in the process. The products themselves are priced competitively (also taking shipping cost into account) and designed with dignity by passionate craftsmen with quality in mind. 

Promise Hub retains 22% of any online purchase to cover overhead and the Game Changer is left with 78%. Local/offline sales proceeds are retained 100% by Game Changers. We have linked Promise Hub’s sustainability to the success of our Game Changers because we truly believe that the underserved and impoverished can be the owners of their success.

We have, so far, designed several revenue streams in order to become self-sustaining:

-Corporate donations

-Small individual donations

-Grants & prizes

-Prototyping partnerships: We welcome partnerships with companies that have promising solutions to challenges outlined in the SDGs and require prototype field testing. Our strategic partners have successfully leveraged our local impact team, location, and position in the community to optimize their products for the African market. Our Local Impact Team is available to leverage their skills and learn new ones in order to install and maintain hardware, organize focus groups, run tests, and communicate findings to these partners. We are currently in a signing process with our first such partner for implementing water filters, solar panels, and a vertical farming solution.

-Purchases on the online marketplace: Promise Hub retains 22% of any purchase made on Promise Hub Collective in order to cover overhead - we estimate a gradual increase over time due to current Game Changers expanding their start-ups to include more and more employees, increase in demand thanks to marketing efforts and an increasing number of available products and services thanks to new Game Changers joining the Hub. 

Capacity

This is the main area with which we believe Solve can help us thanks to its track record and network - partners interested in plugging their insight, experience, and tech solutions into our infrastructure.

Finances

Becoming a Solver team would bring us closer to our sustainability projections, regardless of the amount - As we aim for grants funds worth $50,000 per year anything over would be stretched into subsequent years.

Technical 

We are confident that this is an area with which Solve could be of great help - familiarity with the most effective tools to implement in the right environment is always a good way to maximize efficiency and reduce costs.

Cultural

We have known great progress in balancing imported methodologies and mindsets with learning and local insight thanks to our co-creation approach to workshops, projects, and initiatives. We would, of course, welcome insights from other multicultural teams and their experiences.

Market

As this aspect is key to our long-term sustainability, we would welcome any partnership that would further and augment our marketing strategy

Solution technology - We welcome partners interested in plugging their insight, experience, and tech solutions into our infrastructure

Funding and revenue model - Becoming a Solver team would bring us closer to our sustainability projections, regardless of the amount

Monitoring and evaluation - We would welcome support in structuring our impact tracking methodology and processes

Marketing, media, and exposure - As visibility is closely linked with our self-sustainability target, any support in this is welcomed

-MIT Open Learning, particularly MIT ReACT - we would be interested in finding out more about their insights and experiences and seeing if we could implement some of their certifications to further interested Game Changers’ skills

-MIT-Africa - they’ve implemented quite a few upskilling and dissemination projects and we would be curious to share findings and best practices as well as collaborate on any projects we could align on

-Adriana Schulz - MIT Innovators under 35 2020 list - Nakivale residents are allocated plots of land to build a house on, we can see Adriana Schulz’s user-friendly design tools having potential applications to various start-ups, businesses, and residents

-Rebecca Saive - MIT Innovators under 35 2020 list - As we would like to switch to Solar power as soon as we can afford to, we would be interested in ensuring it operates as effectively as possible - insights from her start-up would be welcomed

-Tony Pan - MIT Innovators under 35 2020 list - Nakivale residents often lack access to electricity, while many hope to one day be able to afford solar panels, Tony Pan’s thermionic converter could cover essential electricity needs (i.e. charging cell phones, cooking) for the local community.

Our pilot Hub is located in Nakivale, Uganda, one of the oldest refugee settlements in the world and is geared towards uplifting this community.

With funds from the Andan Prize for Innovation in Refugee Inclusion, we would continue to upskill our Local Impact Team and Game Changers, fund our seed funding and loan processes for Start-ups, and further support & initiate community-oriented projects.

We are currently leading and supporting the following initiatives in addition to our main activities:

-”Human Journeys”,  a locally created graphic novel on real biographies on how one can become a refugee 

-Funding and logistic support to weekly talent shows with local artists at the only Amphitheater worldwide in a refugee settlement next to our Hub (average weekly attendance of over 1100)

-Funding and logistic support to the local Women Empowerment Group to strengthen them economically, educationally, and mentally.

Promise Hub advocates gender equality, equal treatment, and opportunity for all. Over 45% of the Local Impact Team and

Game Changers are women. One of the first workshop topics is the

importance of open-mindedness in one’s growth and the ability to work with and learn from people with different backgrounds, beliefs, gender, sexual orientation, and experiences.

Our Women’s empowerment activities include holding workshops, preparing materials on family planning and reproductive rights, and we are currently seeking to 3D-print injection molds for menstrual cups. 

We also partner with a local group, Agro for Women, which trains women on Agribusinesses, individual rights, and non-violent communication and provides funding, support, and mentoring. Their themes include:

- Organizing seminars with lawyers to emphasize about the woman right and gender equality

- Menstruation cycle: how to handle periods and get rid of infections. Many unwanted pregnancies in Nakivale are caused by lack of information about periods.

- Debates: public spaces where women can meet and talk about their challenges then come up with innovative solutions.

- The voice talks: inspirational talks from women ambassadors once a year, to inspire the rest of women in Nakivale and beyond.

With funds from the Innovation for Women Prize, we would fund and distribute our menstrual cups initiative throughout the community, further organize women’s empowerment projects, invest in the Women empowerment team’s capacity, and further launch projects and advocate for the benefit of women within the community.

Our curriculum helps Game Changers discover, develop, and monetize their passions through broad development tracks and resources. 

They take part in workshops, access a range of digital and physical tools, and receive encouragement from mentors and peers.

The first two tracks of our curriculum have attracted 62 individuals: Their ages range from 13 to 52, from experienced professionals in tailoring and handicrafts to eager individuals open to opportunities.

While we have learning resources necessary for a variety of businesses (from handicrafts to 3D design and illustration) we are eager to expand our resources and capacity.

Funds from the GM Prize on Good Jobs and Inclusive Entrepreneurship would help fund our upskilling resources, invest in new learning tools, expand the range of tools available and pay for formal certifications (valid nationally/internationally), that require travel, and board for Game Changers that pledge to mentor others upon completion of their qualification.

We invest heavily in developing digital literacy and English skills among all our Game Changers so that they may access global markets.

Our curriculum helps Game Changers discover, develop, and monetize their passions through broad development tracks and resources. 

They take part in workshops, access a range of digital and physical tools, and receive encouragement from mentors and peers.

Funds from the Gulbenkian Award for Adult Literacy would go towards improving our curriculum, expanding our selection of upskilling resources, investing in new learning tools, and launching projects aimed towards increasing employability throughout Nakivale.