Empowering Sustainable Entrepreneurship Africa 2024

About the Program

With support from Norad - the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation, Village Capital has launched Empowering Sustainable Entrepreneurship Africa, a transformative ecosystem-building Africa program aimed at strengthening the capacity and impact of Entrepreneur Support Organizations (ESOs), and climate-focused early-stage startups in Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, and Tanzania.

We are launching Phase One of the initiative to identify 14 high-performing community-led entrepreneur support organizations. These 14 ESOs from Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique and Tanzania will work collaboratively on ecosystem-specific problem statements and strategies to best identify and support high-potential startups in their ecosystems. In addition, to benefit from Village Capital’s strategic support and deep dives with world-class Thematic Experts in blue economy, renewable energy, climate adaptation and food security. 

At the end of 2024, we will select one ESO partner per market to co-lead Venture Programs in 2025-26.

About Ecosystem Building

Village Capital has spent over 10 years improving access to capital for early-stage high-impact startups across Asia, Europe, Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, US, and MENA regions. Although building early-stage impact-creating startups is challenging, many ecosystems have led the way and shown that progress can be achieved with the right combination of actors and capital. One of these practices is to take an ecosystem-building approach. 

Ecosystem building is about creating an enabling environment for early-stage startups to thrive unlocking critical social and financial capital. We focus on impact growth and driving systems-level change that makes impact investing more inclusive and empowers a broader range of entrepreneurs, with a strong preference for founders with lived experience of the problem they seek to solve. 

We believe that thriving ecosystems can develop anywhere, and one of the critical drivers of sustainable and fair development is the empowerment of local visionaries and talent like those found leading and working within local entrepreneur support organizations.

About Greentech

Greentech Global, an initiative led by Village Capital and industry-leading partners, supports scalable market-based innovations addressing sustainability challenges. The initiative prioritizes underrepresented entrepreneurs developing promising solutions tailored to the unique challenges faced by each region.

The initiative focuses on solutions supporting the green energy transition, climate mitigation and adaptation, ecosystem restoration, and the regenerative economy. Leveraging Village Capital’s global network and tools, we mitigate bias, provide training on identifying appropriate capital structures, facilitate direct investment and support regional/global expansion.

Eligibility

We’re looking for locally-led ESOs that are supporting sustainability ventures across sub-Saharan Africa. Eligibility requirements include:

• The ESO must be operating in Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, and Tanzania.

• The organization must be willing to support climate-focused - early-stage, tech-enabled small and medium enterprises with significant growth potential, and/or ventures with scale potential. 

• The organization must support ventures through a formal incubation/accelerator program.

• The organization must be providing or looking to provide training, resources, advice, or support to entrepreneurs around finance and investment.

The organization must have been in operation for more than 2 years OR has grown from co-founder/founder to 5+ employees including middle management (department leads, partnership managers, incubator and accelerator managers, program managers)