We've been asked a number of times why Ungana-Afrika does not operate as a business itself and purely focus on providing business and enterprise development consulting services. The answer is that, although the scenario would be financially more attractive, it would also narrow the scope of our work, limiting the beneficiaries of our activities to those few who are able to pay market related consulting fees, and eventually reducing the impact Ungana-Afrika is able to achieve.
Our professionally run non-profit model allows us to implement programs that support very early stage innovations to reach their potential, new entrepreneurs with the right attitude and required motivation but scarce financial resources, and even other non-profit organisations who are innovating new services that have a chance to become sustainable if they have access to business development expertise. In addition, activities such as open R&D and free sharing of high quality content are both linked to the non-profit mandate of Ungana-Afrika.
We believe that, by combining our programmatic efforts and our consultancy services, we are able to implement the best mix of projects that take us toward our vision of "an eco-system that supports the diffusion of ideas and technologies between technology innovators and social entrepreneurs so that together they may contribute to the development of local economies and the improvement of the quality of life of poor people and the environment they live in".
Program Areas
The non-profit activities of Ungana-Afrika can be divided into four different program areas, as illustrated below:
Current Program Activities
African Social ICT Enterprise Initiative
Ungana-Afrika has designed an African Social ICT Enterprise Initiative to encourage ICT enabled social innovation and entrepreneurship in Africa, with an emphasis on feasible business models that accelerate technology adoption within under-served areas. We are currently approaching key partners and organisations interested in providing start-up finance to allow us to launch and further develop our future flagship initiative.
Southern African Incubation Program
Ungana-Afrika is promoting socially relevant ICT entrepreneurship as a sustainable approach to address many development challenges that underserved communities are facing. The aim for the Southern African Incubation Program is to assist social entrepreneurs to design and incubate sustainable ICT services for the underserved. Program activities include a number of capacity building workshops that are organised within the SADC region. In addition, a few selected non-profit organisations supported by OSISA and Hivos have been receiving mentorship and assistance to develop feasible business models based on locally relevant service concepts.
Participatory Entrepreneurship Development
In its Participatory Entrepreneurship Development project (PED) Ungana-Afrika facilitates needs based and participatory development of innovative mobile technology and broadband related business cases in areas that currently lack the benefits of ICT services and opportunities for technology based entrepreneurship.
Regular Knowledge Sharing
In addition to publishing and freely sharing high-quality publications, Ungana-Afrika team updates our blog with thought provoking texts including interesting case stories, summarising project lessons learnt, analysing specific issues relevant to the rest of the larger community, or sharing external links.
Concept Projects that Need Support
Several Ungana-Afrika projects have some component still under development, or are completely new ideas that we hope to launch in the near future.
We are actively seeking support and partnerships to help get these concepts off the ground. Contact us for a summary of these project concepts, and more information about how you can help.
