SEED Tanzania

SEED local initiative works to promote entrepreneurship among women and youth in Tanzania responding to the hardly pressing unemployment challenge facing women and youth who are also mostly affected by COVID-19 economic consequences. Through SEED about 1500 women and youth aged 18 to 40 years across Tanzania will be able to access trainings and business support services for them to establish and grow profitable businesses for jobs and wealth creation as they become multiplier effects on the ground in promoting inclusive growth.

SEED technical assistance will be a hybrid of physical and online sessions through zonal centers taking advantage of technological growth in reaching more beneficiaries at a low cost while minimizing physical interaction against COVID-19. If this program scaled, more women and youth with have at their convenience access to desired skills and business support for them to be competitively integrated in the global supply chain and improve lives.

Entrepreneurship plays a significant role in jobs and wealth creation, and ultimately improving lives. In Tanzania 3/4 of the working population are making living through entrepreneurship. However, Tanzania's entrepreneurship ecosystem  is not effective as it should have been to support growing entrepreneurs. As a result Tanzanian entrepreneurs especially women and youth are facing numerous barriers hence find themselves continuously engaging in small, informal and unprofitable business. Some of the factors contributing to stagnation of women and youth businesses include gender bias and negative perception on businesses owned by young people. As a result women and youth entrepreneurs tend to be left out of the support circle. For example globally over 2.7 billion women are legally restricted from having the same choice of jobs as men.

Knowing that Women’s economic empowerment boosts productivity, increases economic diversification and income equality in addition to other positive
development outcomes 2030, SEED is bridging the gap by providing the mentioned categories with the support they need to become successful entrepreneurs. The chain of the services by SEED include relevant business education such as business planning, financial literacy, business formalization process, industrial compliance and certification, capital access, products development and pricing, digitization, networking and mentoring. 

SEED (Skills for Employment and Enterprise Development) Tanzania initiative works to accelerating women and youth entrepreneurs aged 18 to 40 years old in promoting inclusive growth. Through the initiative we identify committed women and youth entrepreneurs engaging in productive jobs but are still lacking business support and furnish them with technical assistance for them to operate as competitive and sustainable businesses. Among other things some of the SEED technical assistance include:

-business mapping, assessing, profiling and categorization

-Develop customized capacity building needs including trainings, mentor-ship and coaching programs

- Assist in Business formalization process and certification

-Women and youth owned businesses portal development

- Business capital accessing and networking (Revolving fund)

-Train on digital markets and Integration of verified businesses into digital markets platforms

Technology

-SEED uses webinar for training sessions in created zones

-whats app for mentorships and coaching

-creating online women and youth owned businesses database for marketing and networking

-online business capital application and

- social media for visibility and interaction with customers.

SEED's target population is Tanzanian committed women and youth entrepreneurs aged 18 to 40 years old engaging themselves in productive activities especially in agricultural sector, textile, energy, fintech and technology.

We have  been supporting Tanzania women and youth entrepreneurs for the past two years and got an opportunity to interact and hear what has been their challenges to grow. We have also been going through various studies on labor market and entrepreneurship in Tanzania which has done a great job in information sharing in developing innovative solutions to the identifies entrepreneurial challenges in the country.  In the course of implementation of this program, one of the activities will be to identify, assess, profiling and determining required detailed solution in collaboration with the selected business beneficiary.

SEED activities are the generic to many women entrepreneurs in Tanzania but they will be worked in detail to reflect the actual identified business specific challenges and all the solutions will be customized accordingly during the inception stage.

The unemployment problem in Tanzania and the need for employment promotion through entrepreneurship very much align with the need for good jobs and inclusive entrepreneurship challenge.

SEED initiative focuses on supporting women and youth entrepreneurs in Tanzania provides required support to promote entrepreneurship and create good jobs for marginalized groups of the community at the local level which is the primary challenge's goal.

Women and youth aged 18-40 years old in Tanzania make a large portion of the population yet are less as less integrated in formal economic activities which left them in the category of economically marginalized group. o

SEED is an innovative solution because it seeks to digitalize women and youth entrepreneurs in Tanzania and make them visible in formal digital platforms/markets. Since one of the challenges of online information is verification and identity, SEED will in advance protect potential users of these businesses by having these businesses formalized, certified and verifies so that end users will interact with genuine capable businesses and minimize the risk. 

In the program we will use some of the already existing methods such as online training but our uniqueness is that we will provide local oriented content using a local language for impact. Yet, through we will partly use online content, yet we will be able to combine with physical interaction with add value to the program and builds trust and forge long-term partnership worth beneficiaries. 

SEED uses computer, internet and mobile technology which we will use zoom for training, web service for business database and mobile technology for mentor ship and coaching programs through whats app, business profiling through you tube and marketing through whats app and Instagram.

All the proposed technological platform are already widely used and record is very clear that they are very influential and large number of users including the potential SEED beneficiaries.

Apart from training of which many people are doing, our intervention combine traditional training and digital training of which is not very common in Tanzania especially for women and young entrepreneurs through they have the devices. Digital platforms in Tanzania are considered for people in corporate space. Through SEED women and young entrepreneurs in Tanzania will be integrated in digital solutions from information sharing, business support services to selling as they are going through the process of being integrated into digital economy. Our solution will have direct output as part of the program but in a long run we want to change Tanzanians perception in using digital solutions for improving living standards and assist those interested in creating technological solutions for bot financial profit and social impact.

We have currently served 276 Tanzanian women and young entrepreneurs. In the next one year we are looking forward to directly serve 1500 people and 6500 in five years progressively.

The goals in the next year is to reach 1500 women and young entrepreneurs, 55% of them be from rural areas. The goal is to have them identified, equipped with skills, formalized, verifies and integrated in the global e-market of goods and services.

In five years, we will have reached 6500 entrepreneurs across East Africa Region with above services and continue to work with the graduated beneficiaries as we keep them in the cycle to become mentors of the incoming beneficiaries. The goal is to add value to the entrepreneurship power houses that we will have created and continue to create as we grow and scale into the region.

Currently the demand for our services among the targeted beneficiaries, however we can not accommodate all of them because of

- lack of both additional technical resources as we can not higher/retain large number experts as we are facing financial constrain. 
-  our current operating physical space is small and at times we rent from outside providers which is also another cost.

- As much as we wish to be a full cycle business providers, some times it is very difficult to negotiate with financial services providers to support our entrepreneur because we have no facilities like credit guarantee

The possible barriers in the next five years as we are eying to scale our operations into the region anticipated to be:

-the change of politics among regional member states may affect on how host countries perceive providers of other countries.

-availability of resources to run large operations with fully compliance and continuity because of the currently ongoing changes in the international development space

In the next one year one of the ways to mitigate the challenge is to mobilize resources to expand our operations in which the beneficiaries will be used to implement the next 5 years plans. If provided with SOLVE $300,000 it will help meet the 1500 beneficiaries by expanding our operations meeting our current challenges as explained above. Some of the money will be used to extend short term business funding to selected entrepreneurs with the anticipation that our partnership with SOLVE will assist in getting professional support from them to fill the experts gap as we serve more entrepreneurs.

In the next five years some of the ways to mitigate the potential challenges is to work in partnership with local organizations in the host countries to leverage resources and local knowledge. We will also use the already established network of graduated entrepreneurs for them to become our multiplier effect in the areas we operate hence bringing services closer to the people in need at a low cost.

As for regional politics we will continue to learn and have our selves updated on the signed protocols such as free trade area and other other trade agreements and see the best way to take advantage of them while fully complying to local legal requirements.

Full time staff 3

Part time 5

SEED Team is a combination of experienced resource people in different thematic areas including digital solutions, financial management, sociology, law, international development, marketing and innovation as well as gender and social inclusion.

Our team is made up of Tanzanian 5 women and three men knowledgeable of the current employment challenges facing the world and how technology can play a role promoting employment for emerging markets. 

Being an experienced local women established and managed organization focusing in achieving social impact and financial capacity, we are identified as  a strategic local partner in championing development in Tanzania and responding to hardly pressing development challenges.

Advance Africa through SEED we provide technical assistance to committed new and small business owners in Tanzania for them to formalize and grow profitable and sustainable businesses. Among other things we provide business training, working space, mentor ship and coaching services, access to finance, product development and marketing.

Most of the women and youth businesses are small and informal hence can not compete in the market as result fail to contribute to the job creation efforts. They need our services and services like SEED to take them through from where they are to the next level.

SEED is an initiative by Advance Africa a social enterprise which sells professional services as highlighted in the website. We serve both ready established corporate services where we charge them market rate, while customers like women and youth may be adopted into subsidized interventions like SOLVE challenge.

From the businesses we support, we sign MoU for us to become business partners helping in management of the organization for continues technical support services and share part of the profit and that's why our service is unique.

We keep on mobilizing resources from all other sources that are sharing vision with us such as SOLVE, governments, donors and investors.

Advance Africa financial sustainability is through a combination of methods as explained above.

The fund will assist in expanding and scaling our services to more people in need which are currently constrained with lack of resources.

The resources we are looking for is both partnerships for technical support and financial resources.

we are looking for partnership that will enhance our technical capabilities as well as financial resources to meet our expanding operating costs and business funding for our entrepreneurs.

MIT business and ICT faculty to be able to promote digital employment such as software developers, fintech and other tech based solutions which are still very immature in the country.

One of the service we provide is technical assistance in developing refugees settlement interventions especially those promoting improvement of livelihood and economic position of the refugees.

We will be more than happy to learn about Andan Prize.

Apart from other services we provide our current focus area is Gender and Social inclusion especially now when women are more affected with COVID-19 socially, politically and economically.  Even current SEED solution is mostly giving priority to women entrepreneurs along youth entrepreneurs.

Because SEED solution is promoting entrepreneurship and technological solutions as workable solution against employment challenges for women and youth who are mostly left out of the corporate world engaging in small and informal businesses hence sustainability is in question. SEED is working to respond to this gap which is also the motive behind Good Jobs and Inclusive Entrepreneurship challenge.