This year has been an exciting year for the E4Impact Entrepreneurship Centre in Nairobi! It has been the year where we’ve managed to grow despite the pandemic. Our growth has been in various fronts, and we sincerely thank our benefactors, partners, and colleagues for holding our hands together and move forward towards impacting the lives of the entrepreneurs and value chain actors and small holder farmers that we serve.
Notable new programmes.
(i) Restoration factory that is funded GEF-funded project by In collaboration with IUCN and FAO and in the context of the Restoration Initiative, a, UNEP is welcoming its first cohort of restoration ecopreneurs to participate in an innovative business incubator program aimed at strengthening the economic potential of their ideas to unlock more finance, more quickly. which is an innovative incubation program aiming at supporting Kenyan eco-entrepreneurs developing restoration projects.
(ii) AYuTe Agri-tech challenge which is a timely intervention promoting an innovation culture among the youth in Kenya in agriculture, ultimately contributing to the country’s food security. It is an initiative funded by Heifer Project International Kenya (HPIK), which will work closely to E4Impact Accelerator in running the AYuTe Kenya Challenge in Kenya from June to December 2022. E4Impact Foundation will employ its expertise in acceleration to develop a strategic direction for youth, agriculture, and technology competition, in line with the HPIK mission and approach.
Growth of the Team: A year ago, the E4Impact team in Nairobi had a staff of 10, but as of July this year, our team has grown to 22 full time staff members. The new team have come to strengthen capacity of our team by supporting existing and new programmes such as the E4Impact Accelerator and Incubator programmes where we have added new vertical leads to increase the specialized support to our entrepreneurs and well as supporting field projects through coordination, training and coaching of enterprises/small holder producers in the field (outside of major cities).
Launch of the Esiolo Market place (www.esiolo.com) that is a e-commerce trading platform and 13 digital shops for cooperatives/farmer groups in Isiolo county as a way of building resilience for Agro-pastoralist communities in Northern Kenya. Since its launch in May, the platform has enabled 3 cooperatives to triple their sales by shortening the value chain and linking them directly with financial consumers. Such a platform is worthwhile being scaled to other counties as well.
We invite you to go through the newsletter and see what we have in store for you!
By David Cheboryot
Director, East Africa
E4Impact Entrepreneurship Centers
