Our client: GIZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit GmbH) – a German international development agency
Duration: 24 months (2018-2020)
Our end customer: 20 businesses in Egypt and their employees
The challenge
GIZ aims to support inclusive businesses in Egypt that will create new, high-quality employment for people living at the bottom of the pyramid (BOP).
Among GIZ’s targets is helping to scale up 20 micro, small and medium-sized businesses in the manufacturing industry. This required experts to work with a local delivery partner to design and implement a business accelerator.
Our solution
The Impact Collective put together a team with experience of supporting start-ups, designing and delivering training, developing accelerator programmes, and working with bottom of the pyramid businesses.
The programme was implemented in three phases:
- Training the local delivery partner: We delivered 10 tailored ‘Training of Trainer’ modules on inclusive businesses and scale-up strategies, with a focus on improving selected ventures’ social and economic impact (Jan 2018 – Feb 2018).
- Working with the partner to establish and run the accelerator: Under our supervision and guidance, the local partner prepared and set up the first round of the accelerator (May 2018 – Nov 2018). Takamol is a six-month scale-up programme supporting growth-stage, inclusive businesses in the manufacturing industries to grow, scale and increase social impact. The programme provides high-potential businesses with technical expertise, coaching, mentoring, peer-to-peer learning, network building and access to finance.
- Supporting the partner to run the second cohort/year: In the final phase (from Jan 2019), the delivery partner took the lead on implementation, with the Impact Collective responsible for oversight and available for support as needed. We also focused on impact measurement and helped prepare a final report with assessment of key lessons learned.
The result
In May 2018 we kicked off the Takamol programme to support 10 inclusive businesses in Egypt. The first 10 selected ventures work in chemicals, textiles, food, handicrafts/furniture, and consumer goods – all of them looking to employ and empower workers from low-income communities. These were: BG Group, Brimore, Camicie, FUFA, Gebraa, Hamco, Jammies, Jereed, Lantique, and Mehna w Mostakbal.
In April 2019 we kicked off the second year of the Takamol programme with 10 new inclusive businesses who were selected from 51 applications working in handicrafts, agriculture waste, textiles, dairy, household accessories, natural cosmetics, and furniture. These were: Leaves & Co, Ellie Home Décor, Napata, Azha Studio, Dairy House, Nahla Soliman Designs, Eden Greens Egypt, ART Euphoria, Nesrin Made, and Yashmak.
With our local partner, Outreach Egypt, we helped these businesses to develop scale-up plans and growth strategies, and to implement those plans through 120+ hours of tailored training, mentorship, and ad-hoc expert support for each cohort.
Each year ended with all 10 of each cohort completing the programme successfully and pitching at our closing events in December. Some of the successes of the programme include receiving loans and investment, collaborating with bigger partners, sales deals, and expanding their businesses.
We are very proud of the outcome of this project and what it was able to achieve for the 20 IBs we supported, as well as building up the expertise of our delivery partner to be able to continue to support these businesses and run a program like this again if they wished and were able to do so.
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