Tag: entrepreneurship

Financial Literacy Hackathon winning teams

12, 13, 19, 20 July 2023

Over the last 5 years, Belle and Co. has been delivering unique and customised innovation workshops for Lifechoice’s Coding Academy students. Twice a year, these important sessions open up the creative potential of young learners who can practically apply their coding skills to solve a problem in their community.

Financial Literacy levels in South Africa

This year, the workshops focused on an important problem prevalent in South Africa today – lack of financial literacy skills (see also our previous hackathon here). According to a 2021 survey conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the level of financial literacy in South Africa is quite low, with only 42% of the adult population being financially literate. Financial literacy is the ability to understand and know how to manage personal finances effectively.

The Hackathon

Taking place over a 2-week period, each student group had to come up with tech-based solutions to topics such as budgeting, savings, investing, credit score and more. Supported by Belle and Co facilitator, Zikhona Madubela, each group was encouraged to use design thinking skills to delve into the problem and come up with “never seen before” solutions. To support them further, the participants were also taken on a journey to explore the fascinating intersection of “Money and Psychology” with an enlightening talk by the guest speaker and financial guru, Olivia Teek.

Image: Zikhona and Olivia.

The participants were not only inspired but also motivated to take control of their financial journeys. A highlight of the hackathon was witnessing the brilliant tech-based solutions that the dynamic participants developed during the intense brainstorming and coding sessions. A total of 10 innovative Financial Literacy “tech-based solutions” were produced, each addressing different aspects of financial education and empowerment.

🏆 The Winning Solutions 🏆

🥇 Group 1: Dollar Sense 📊

The talented minds behind Dollar Sense designed an ingenious budgeting tool that empowers individuals to manage their finances effectively. This solution provides a user-friendly interface and insightful features, ensuring that users can make smart financial decisions and achieve their financial goals with confidence. 🥇

Group 2: Invest Inn 💼

Invest Inn wowed the judges with their investment educational website, providing a comprehensive platform for novices to seasoned investors to enhance their knowledge about the world of investing. With easy-to-understand resources, interactive modules, and expert insights, Invest Inn promises to be a game-changer in nurturing a generation of savvy investors.

Our heartfelt congratulations go out to the winning teams, Dollar Sense and Invest Inn, for their exceptional efforts and well-deserved victories. However, every participant contributed significantly to the success of this hackathon by showcasing their passion for financial literacy and their determination to create meaningful solutions.

A special shoutout to Olivia Teek for sharing her invaluable wisdom on the psychology behind money management, which undoubtedly inspired all the participants to think differently about their financial choices.

Lastly, we extend our gratitude to Life Choices Coding Academy for providing the perfect platform to nurture young talents and foster a culture of innovation and learning. 🙏 We are truly proud of everyone who participated and supported this remarkable event. Together, we are shaping a financially literate future, one brilliant idea at a time. Let’s continue to champion financial literacy and empower individuals to secure their financial well-being.

FinancialLiteracy #EmpoweringYouth #HackathonSuccess #FinancialEducation #MoneyMatters #Investing #Savings #Budgeting #CreditScore #DebtFreeFuture

Ground Up: Local workshop on SE indicators

14 April

As part of the EU Erasmus Plus Programme called “Ground Up: Social Entrepreneurial Ecosystems for Resilient Cities”, Belle and Co. designed and delivered a 1 hour local workshop for Social Enterprises in South Africa. The response was overwhelming with 50 RSVPs streaming in, curious to know more about the project,

The project outcome: A set of indicators to measure the health of the Social Enterprise Ecosystem.
Number of partners countries involved: 11 Partners (North Macedonia, Costa Rica, South Africa, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Poland, Denmark, Ecuador, Serbia and Peru)
Number of months: 18 month project (Jan 2022 – until July 2023)

A project of this nature is inherently tricky, as it is trying to capture a set of mainly quantitative indicators to measure how well supported the Social Enterprise Ecosystem is in a given local (city, region, nation).

The 4 pillars the project focused on include:

  • Human Capital
  • Funding and Finance
  • Support Systems
  • Quality of Life

The local workshop, held on the 14 April 2023, was to showcase the Social Enterprise Ecosystem Assessment Tool that the SA team had developed so far and the data sources they had managed to find. It was also an opportunity for the ecosystem themselves to validate or dispute the tool and its sources.

WORKSHOP VIDEO

If you missed this session, you can view the whole workshop video here:

Sentebale Women’s Entrepreneurship Programme @GSB

13-17 March 2023

The University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business approached Belle and Co. with a unique offer : to help the Solution Space deliver a 5-day Bootcamp for 35 Female Entrepreneurs from Lesotho through their partner, Sentebale.

Sentebale is an NGO founded by Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex and Prince Seeiso of Lesotho, in 2006 as a response to the needs of children and young people in Lesotho. The name means ‘forget-me-not’ in the Sesotho language, representing a pledge to remember the most vulnerable children in the region.

As part of Sentebale’s 4th pillar of work “Education & Livlihoods”, 35 female entrepreneurs were chosen to attend the Sentebale Women’s Entrepreneurship Programme in Cape Town, at the GSB’s Solution Space. Belle and Co. together with Entreprenerdy, a Norwegian headquartered online business programme, co-delivered a 5-day bootcamp.

The main aim of the bootcamp was two fold:

!) Mentorship: Build a strong cohort of female entrepreneur leaders and mentors to inspire young women in various districts of Lesotho;

2) Business skills: Build professional business skills through exposure to business tools and resources.

The University of Cape Town (UCT) is still the best university in Africa, according to the latest QS World University Rankings.

And home to the Graduate School of Business (GSB) (pictured left),

Belle and Co. assigned two Belle and Co Associates, Thobeka Poswa and Zikhona Madubela, to design and deliver the mentorship programme, while Entreprenerdy co-delivered the business skills component of the bootcamp deploying their online platform and resources. This was a physical face-to face programme over 5 days.

In addition to the rich programme content, 3 guest speakers were also invited to speak on issues related to “Women in business”, “Social Entrepreneurship”. and “Gender-related issues”. We are so grateful for Ntombozuko, Zikhona and Otsile who shared their experience as women in business to speak to some of the issues and struggles faced by female entrepreneurs still today.

100 Girls in Business Programme (Oribi @GSB)

11 October 2022

Belle and co was priviledged to be involved in two sessions on Social Enterprise and Ideation at the ORIBI’s Girls in Business Programme held UCT GSB Solution Space, Philippi Village.

Below a short video reel captured by one of Belle and Co’s facilitators, Zikhona Madubela. This snippet shows the first “role play” designed as TV interview on what a social enterprise is using a coffee shop as an example, and then diving deep into the example of Gangstar Coffee – a social enterprise who employs ex-gangsters as barristers.

They then went on to identify problems in their community, and ideated on solutions. The winning teams then got selected to the second round of Girls in Business programme.

After an intense day with 100 energetic girls, we received a beautiful note from our client, Oribi Village via email:

On behalf of the Oribi Team, l would like to thank you both for designing such a beautiful session. It was amazing seeing the girls engage and get introduced to social entrepreneurship in such a cool way. We hope to engage with you both soon as the program will be starting next week.Once again thank you for helping us make this event a success!!

Mitchel Nkhama (Oribi Village, Incubation Officer) Website: www.oribi.org.za 

Below an example of programme brochure (April 2024, source: Zikhona Madubela Facebook.)

Entrepreneurship Policy Mini-Workshop

10 June 2022

This policy toolkit was co-created by Innovation for Policy Foundation (i4Policy) and Make-IT in Africa, with the support of leading policy experts and GIZ. The Entrepreneurship Policy Mini-workshop served to introduce this beta toolkit to a wider audience at the Pan-African Youth Assembly.

Belle and Co. helped design and deliver the workshop session with the i4policy team. The toolkit is available in Beta form on the https://ecosystem.build/toolkit website.

i4Policy is focused on innovative policy processes at the local and regional level advancing entrepreneurship and digital transformation in Africa. The goal of i4Policy is to help shape African policy and create an environment that encourages business growth and innovation.

The Future is Co-Created

The title of this blog “The Future is Co-Created” is a tag line from an amazing client that Belle and Co. is privileged to be working with, The Innovation for Policy Foundation. Haven’t heard about them yet? Let me introduce you …

The Innovation for Policy Foundation (i4Policy) is a pan-African non-governmental organization that brings citizens, communities and governments together to co-create the future! They do this by:

  • Re-imagining governance
  • Designing participation
  • Teaching Transformation

Re-imagining Governance

From co-initiating and coordinating the Global Assembly, to launching a viral crowdsourcing campaign during the covid-19 pandemic that reached more than 200m people, i4Policy works to amplify people power to address the greatest challenges and opportunities of our generation.

Designing participation

We design and host open and effective public engagement processes: from global declarations to national legislation, from one-off consultations to multi-year co-decision processes, and across the policy cycle from agenda setting through to collective sense-making.

Teaching Transformation

We develop open source tools, research, participation methodologies, and governance ontologies to support the transformation of our economies and societies. We’ve trained and equipped hundreds of government officials and community leaders in more than 80 countries to lead this transformation.

Read more about their work here: https://i4policy.org

In February 2022, Belle and co. was approached to join the i4Policy team as their Pedagogical expert. A major project they were developing, revolved around designing resources, tools and learning material for policy-makers in the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Ecosystem in Africa.

This work has become increasingly important as more and more African countries are adopting a new forward-looking Start-Up law-making process to support high growth entrepreneurs, many of them in the tech-based ecosystem.

I4Policy Foundation has assisted many governments to pursue more participatory policy processes (see below ADDIS process and the Senegal Start Up Case Study as an example of activities supported). The idea is to be as inclusive as possible when co-designing meaningful policies with the people whose lives will be impacted.

In my next few blogs, you will start to read about the policy-related projects that Belle and co. will be helping to develop over the year/s to come. See related Tags: Policy, i4Policy to find those blog posts.

Creative Enterprise E-Learning

December 2021

In January 2021, the British Council, appointed Belle and Co. and its supplier consortium (Made Culture, Nigeria and Heva Fund, Kenya), supported by UK partner University of Arts London, to expand its digital programme delivery and to this end, commissioned a suite of e-learning courses, to support young people in the development of their knowledge in creative entrepreneurship.

Over the next 4 months, Belle and Co. and its consortium, were in charge of developing:

  • Module 1: Launching your Creative Enterprise
  • Module 2: Growing your Creative Enterprise

A further Module 3 on Impact Entrepreneurship and Module 4 on Creative Economy Policy, were designed by another service provider.

Module 1: Launching your Creative Enterprise

This entry-level module consists of 5 courses comprising of a total of 50-60 lessons.
Each course should take the learner 2,5 hours to complete. Which means, Module 1 should take around 12 hours to complete.

Module 2: Growing your Creative Enterprise

This intermediate level module consists of 7 courses comprising a total of around 70-80 lessons.
Each course should take the learner 2,5 hours to complete. Which means, Module 2 should take around 17 hours to complete.

A mixed media approach was used including video case studies, interviews, PDFs, PPTs, Worksheets, and Quizzes.

Click through the carousel to see what the courses look like online:

Each Course starts with a welcome video by the Course facilitator. In this case, Malaika Toyo (Made Culture), is introducing Module 1: Course 3 on Marketing and Branding.

A variety of Video Case Studies were produced from across the continent. Pictured here is an entrepreneur from Egypt, and an Entrepreneur from Rwanda.

Some Video case studies take the form of an interview. Pictured here is an Entrepreneur from South Africa being interviewed by one of our facilitators.

Should you be interested in signing up, visit: https://communitytraining.britishcouncil.org and sign up for free!

To help you decide, here are the course summaries (cheat sheets) of each course below:

COURSE SUMMARIES OF MODULE 1: Launching Your Creative Enterprise

Basic-Crs-1-Summary-African-Creative-EconomyDownload
Basic-Crs-2-Summary-Bringing-Your-Idea-to-LifeDownload
Basic-Crs-3-Summary-Finding-the-Right-PeopleDownload
Basic-Crs-4-Summary-Building-Your-BusinessDownload
Basic-Crs-5-Summary-Branding-and-MarketingDownload

COURSE SUMMARIES OF MODULE 2: Growing Your Creative Enterprise

Intermediate-Crs-1-Summary-Entrepreneurship-JourneyDownload
Intermediate-Crs-2-Summary-Your-Growth-JourneyDownload
Intermediate-Crs-3-Summary-Protecting-My-BusinessDownload
Intermediate-Crs-4-Summary-Finance-for-CreativeDownload
Intermediate-Crs-5-Leading-Self-and-Teams-Summary-1Download
Intermediate-Crs-6-Raising-Capital-for-BusinessDownload
Intermediate-Crs7-Summary-Promoting-and-PitchingDownload