Connecting refugee entrepreneurs with capital

Uganda has the largest refugee population in Africa and the sixth largest in the world.

Refugees from South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo come to Uganda fleeing violence and food insecurity. But the situation in Uganda is deteriorating. According to the European Commission, the number of people struggling to find food has gone up by almost 15% in the last year, causing refugees to “resort to desperate measures, such as early marriage, child labour, and transactional sex.” Although Uganda is struggling to keep up with the constant influx of immigrants, organisations like Relevant Ventures insist that refugees can help create a better future, not only for themselves, but for everyone.

Take Aime for example – a 24-year-old refugee from DRC living in Uganda, and the founder of Patapia. Patapia is a “bank for the unbankable,” providing microloans to refugee women in Uganda to start their own businesses and achieve financial independence. Patapia has proof of concept, yet Aime has struggled to finance her business.

Relevant Ventures supports refugees like Aime in Uganda by helping her grow her business and increase social impact. Relevant is a purpose venture catalyst and was born from the shared belief of the founding team that purpose-driven enterprise is crucial for solving the world’s most pressing problems. Building on the respective personal experiences of the founders and leveraging over a decade in the social innovation and impact investing space, Relevant focuses on entrepreneurial capacity building, access to finance, and using the power of enterprise to identify and scale viable solutions as levers to realise its vision of a world that is equitable for all.

The founding team – Edson Niwamanya and Maike Striffler in Uganda, Gregor Riss and Nikolaus Hutter in Austria, and Stefan Kurandic in Serbia – have a history of working together on a variety of initiatives. Nikolaus has advised international NGOs on enterprise and investment and working with purpose ventures and impact investors for over a decade. Edson and Maike were with Social Innovation Academy (SINA) in Uganda, where they saw how enterprises founded by marginalized youth and refugees drive real change but often struggle to secure the funding needed to grow. Gregor led business development at Helioz, a pioneering impact venture in Austria operating in the clean water space.

The team saw how access to finance was a huge issue for marginalised entrepreneurs, so they started a bold experiment: the Purpose Pool—a funding pool to help social entrepreneurs overlooked by traditional sources of finance. The Purpose Pool is a radically innovative approach, combining several proven elements in a novel way, including peer-to-peer selection process and payback from a revenue share.

Two years of pilot work led to the decision to create a separate organization focused on making it easier for businesses to access the support they need. Thus, Relevant Ventures was born, starting in Austria and Uganda.

Today, Relevant Ventures builds enterprise and investment solutions to address the humanitarian and planetary crises. Relevant operates a platform for entrepreneurial capacity building and access finance solutions for entrepreneurs in the blind spots of the market, and a venture studio to build ventures that should exist and thrive, but don’t. Collaborative by default, radical in its approach and open-source based, Relevant’s journey showcases the power of cooperation, innovation, and commitment to making the world a more equitable place.

So far, the team has facilitated $86,700 in investments into six SMEs, which have repaid over $6,000 and created more than 90 jobs, while raising $242,000 in additional funding. Considering the significant growth on the businesses, the Purpose Pool is on track to become a revolving fund in the next three years, with payback being reinvested in future SMEs and business development support services.

To learn more about Relevant Ventures, click here.