Nairobi, Kenya December 4, 2019 – More than 300 delegates have converged for the Impact!Africa Social Entrepreneurship Summit to discuss ways of funding innovations in Africa.
The Impact!Africa Social Entrepreneurship Summit to be held at the Kenya School of Monetary Studies from December 4-5, 2019 brings together social entrepreneurs from the public and private sectors to share experiences and exchange ideas on the best way to finance social enterprises.
This year is the third such forum following similar summits in Ghana and South Africa in 2017 and 2018 respectively. The forum aims to prepare and inspire young social entrepreneurs, policymakers and educational institutions to transform their passion for social change into action.
The main theme of the summit is Collaborative Finance for Social Innovation and how to catalyze social innovation in Africa through:
- The Future of Financing for Social Innovation
- Framework for Social Innovation
The two-day summit is a partnership by the British Council and Ashoka to accelerate innovative solutions to Africa’s most pressing challenges by inspiring, supporting and connecting leading social entrepreneurs and key ecosystem players across countries, organizations, and sectors such as policy, social investment, business and media across Africa.
The British Council Regional Director for Sub Saharan Africa, Moses Anibaba says:
“In 2018 at the Impact!Africa summit in South Africa, we got a taste of what could happen if you really bring social entrepreneurs together. A number of social entrepreneurs are using this space doing great work in their community but they are not leveraging each other and are ending up repeating the same mistakes. One major difficulty for social entrepreneurs is finance, because they are not your everyday traditional business, hence banks are reluctant to offer loans. We want to discuss other innovative ways of talking about these issues.
“What we are doing this year is to provide a framework for social innovation to inspire people and let them know we have the solutions here and it’s all about how we leverage what other people are doing. We also want to try and lift the lid on the myth about the financing model for social entrepreneurship which many people think is complicated.” Last year’s summit in Johannesburg in South Africa brought together over 200 leading social innovators and young leaders who are active in Africa’s key social issues as well as 400 key players from the corporate, investment and public sectors to share, learn and co-create new solutions to current challenges.
“This 2019 summit brings together globally-minded and locally-grounded African social entrepreneurs and companies to showcase innovative solutions and systems that impact social justice, markets, and society in general,” Pape Samb, Ashoka Vice President for Africa.
According to a British Council study in 2016, The State of Social Enterprise in Kenya social enterprise activity is gaining momentum in Kenya with an estimated 43,933 social enterprises in the country, many of them recently established and optimistic about the future.
Kenya’s social entrepreneurship ecosystem is vibrant and if the economy continues to grow at current levels while insulating itself against the risks of political instability and insecurity, then there is every reason to be optimistic about the potential for further expansion in response to the socio-economic challenges which exist. However, the fact that the ecosystem is relatively young presents both risk and opportunity.
The study also highlights a significant number of social enterprises had been supported by donations in cash or in-kind (37.4%). A greater proportion of female-led social enterprises receives support in this form (53%). One in every four respondents said that they received no financial support at all. Just five percent had accessed commercial loans which are perhaps unsurprising in the Kenyan context. Banks in Kenya find it expensive to monitor loans of small value and carrying out due diligence is costly because of a lack of credit rating agencies, which makes it harder for banks to lend to small firms
The British Council and Ashoka both focus on economic systems that benefit people in Africa. Within the African context, both institutions programmatically facilitate growth and improvement of the (social) entrepreneurship sector, support meaningful youth development, expand education, and training opportunities for the youth of Africa. This collaboration is driven by the ethos of promoting Pan-Africanism (Leadership, Collaboration, and Ecosystem) in the social entrepreneurship sector in Africa.
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