Village Enterprise, our great-mentality partners, raised $3.5m of working capital to provide to entrepreneurs who live in extreme poverty . They used this money as seed capital for training and mentoring to start more than 4,600 small sustainable businesses in rural Kenya and Uganda by 2020.
More than 760 million people are living in extreme poverty, many of them in sub-Saharan Africa even though there has been many development works and billions of dollars expended on the continent and globally. Village Enterprise aims to improve the income levels for these new business owners with this fund.
“Eliminating poverty is a global priority, but funding is limited,” said Village Enterprise’s CEO Dianne Calvi. “Mobilizing private capital is critical if we are to achieve the United Nation’s #1 Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of ending extreme poverty by 2030.”
Village Enterprise and Instiglio are partnering with private impact investors and the United States Agency for International Development’s Development Innovation Ventures (USAID DIV) and the U.K. Department for International Development (DFID) on the Village Enterprise Development Impact Bond.