CARE – Business incubation support of women and youth in Côte d’Ivoire

Situation

CARE Côte d’Ivoire has a set-up over hundreds of Village Saving and Loan Associations (VSLAs) throughout Côte d’Ivoire. The youth and women of these saving groups primarily tend to save money for unexpected expenses. However there is a lack of tendency to consider these savings as potential investment capital to start their own business. 

CARE sees a huge opportunity in training VSLAs in entrepreneurship and provide them the coaching on starting their own businesses, with small step-by-step investments. 

CARE, Proportion and partners of the PTI program successfully applied for funding from USAID.

Assignment

CARE requested Proportion:

1. To guide the market research of existing and new business opportunities that micro-entrepreneurs (beneficiaries) can put into practice to earn income and build confidence. 
2. To develop a curriculum that VSLA agents can deliver to beneficiary target groups as introduction course to entrepreneurship and as business incubation training. 
3. To build capacity of advanced entrepreneurs to grow their business.

Approach

1. Participatory market research & analysis
   ProPortion delivered the participatory research and mapping of local existing and new economic opportunities for replication in target communities together with youth and women groups
2. Curriculum design
   Proportion designed an entrepreneurship development program for youth and women at risk of enrolment in violent extremist movements:
   1. Introduction to entrepreneurship
   2. Business incubation training (20 weeks)
   3. Mentoring to grow the business of most successful entrepreneurs.
3. Training of trainers
   Proportion trained 20 VSLA group leaders as training facilitators. Empowered by an e-learning platform, the VSLA group leaders trained their group members
4. Set-up mentoring concept through video-based mentoring.

Results

Proportion designed an introduction course based on its 5P model: over 1000 youths and women reflected their Passion, Power, Purpose, (customers’) Problem and (value) Proposition.  

For the advanced course, Proportion has designed an entrepreneurship curriculum that is highly based on human-centered design principles. 20 weekly classes guide 500 start-up entrepreneurs in how to empathise with their customers and stakeholders,  how to develop a customer-centered business idea, and convert that into a prototype for user validation. 

The best 100 entrepreneurs now receive mentorship through video-based question and answer sessions.

This project was commissioned by CARE Cote d’Ivoire and led by Thomas and Proportion Global consultants in Cote d’Ivoire. If you’ve enjoyed reading this case and want to dive deeper, we’d love to hear from you and we will connect you with relevant designers like Thomas, who worked on this project Contact Us