Reports

A new report delves into the pivotal role of Entrepreneur Support Organizations (ESOs) in bolstering Rural Impacting Enterprises (RIEs) across sub-Saharan Africa. RIEs are a critical backbone of many African economies, forming a substantial portion of the Small and Growing Businesses (SGBs) segment.

Low-income communities, defined in this report as those in the United States who make less than 200% of the federal poverty line, are a substantial part of our society and represent 27.5% of adults. Yet people in these communities so often struggle to take substantial steps forward economically due to inequitable systems.

Since 2009, our team at Village Capital has been helping impact-creating entrepreneurs get the social and financial capital they need to bring their ideas from vision to scale. We do this within our accelerators and outside our accelerator programs, too – by designing, testing, and sharing new tools, research, technology, and processes around equitable entrepreneurship.

Over the past decade, we’ve witnessed a transformative shift in how critical services – notably in the financial, educational, and healthcare sectors – are delivered worldwide through new digital platforms.

Around this time last year, we shared a first look at Resource with you through “Who Supports the Supporters?” The report captured our earliest learnings and impact findings in driving nationwide systems-level inclusion for BIPOC innovators through local ecosystems. After completing the second Resource cohort, we took a step back to strategically assess, learn, and reimagine the initiative’s next impact phase.

The disabled community - including people with physical, mental, developmental, and intellectual disabilities - accounts for nearly 1.3 billion individuals worldwide.

Village Capital initially embarked on our ecosystem-building journey in 2016 to address the question, “How can ecosystem builders best support entrepreneurs to succeed?”

What’s working in entrepreneur support in Uganda? “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts” is a phrase associated with the principles behind entrepreneurship ecosystem development. When ecosystem actors collaborate, the value they create by working together is larger than if they work independently. This certainly rings true with what we’ve experienced working with more than 170 fellow Entrepreneur Support Organisations (ESOs) from 40 countries since 2015.

It’s becoming ever clearer: our world faces a series of unprecedented and interlocking challenges – from the deepening climate emergency to rising income inequality and massive health disparities. We know that entrepreneurs all around the world are spearheading innovations to these problems, in a local, contextualized way, based on their own lived experiences and knowledge of local problems and possibilities. At Village Capital, we believe it’s our duty to support this locally-led innovation - unlocking capital for entrepreneurs who are tapping into their lived experience to advance the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Supporting innovative entrepreneurs requires ecosystem innovation to reduce the barriers that stand in their way. That’s why we’ve set out to research, test, and create solutions that equip the startup ecosystem to reduce the gender financing gap.

Over the last two years, Resource (an initiative from Village Capital and Black Innovation Alliance) has supported community-led entrepreneur support organizations (ESOs) working to provide space for people of color in a local startup ecosystem. They operate on the level of a city, state, neighborhood or Indigenous nation.

Globally, there are an estimated 281 million international migrants and over 55 million internally displaced persons.