The Hi-Innovator poverty alleviation strategy has created close to 60,000 jobs for youth and women entrepreneurs over the last three years of implementation, says Ag. Managing Director Patrick Ayota in a press release.
Mr Ayota also revealed that the plan has so far supported 173 women and youth-owned businesses across all sectors of the economy with UGX 9.9 billion seed funding.
In November last year, NSSF launched the women Hi-Innovator Accelerator, a fully-fleged female cohort aimed at stimulating the participation of the female gender in business.
The grand initiative aimed to aid female entrepreneurs across all sectors with equal opportunities to improve their business skills and grow their businesses into resilient and scalable enterprises that are more competitive and better placed to access funding from financial institutions.
It should be noted that most women still face barriers that impinge their participation in business, like difficulties to obtain funds from banks, investors, relatives, friends, and preconceived notions of their appropriate roles in business and society.
The women umbrella is the fourth cohort of the NSSF Hi-innovator Programme, an Innovation and poverty alleviation initiative pionnered by the NSSF in partnership with Mastercard Foundation to create an ecosystem through which small but growing businesses by Ugandan entrepreneurs can be supported to morph into scalable and sustainable enterprises.
“When we launched the NSSF Hi-innovator in May 2021, we set a target of creating 132,000 work opportunities for youths countrywide by 2025. We are close to 50% of that target and as businesses in the pipeline begin realizing more value from the funding provided, more and more work opportunities will be created,” Ayota revealed.
The Hi-innovator program provides Ugandan entrepreneurs with seed funding worth Shs75m each and entrepreneurial training using a self-directed online learning platform, the NSSF Hi-innovator Business Academy.
After the completion of the online course which takes three to four weeks, one can then apply for funding, on condition that their business has been in operation for the last two years.
93 more women-owned businesses have benefitted from the latest round of seed funding after selection by the programme Investments Committee that evaluates competing entrepreneurs.
During the launch of the female cohort in November last year, Richard Zulu, the chairperson for Start-up Uganda that is at the helm of the implementation of the programme explained that potential businesses are selected from the Hi-innovator business online academy and are then subjected to a boot camp that prepares them to pitch for seed funding.
“The reason we have the first step which is the business academy is to prepare you for the next step which is the accelerator, for instance; how do we help you from being informal to formal,” said Richard Zulu.
“When you are done with the online academy, then you apply for funding. The criteria is very simple. Don’t come and say that i have an idea in the head. We want to see it walking.”
The High Innovator initiative was carefully crafted by experts at NSSF in close collaboration with Mastercard foundation, after a careful analysis of the ecosystems in the country and how they work in tandem with job creation, after which it was realized that SMEs are major agents of employment opportunities.
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