Closing the investment gap through a replicatable funding model
The Problem
Aime Rebecca, Founder of Patapia, is a 24 year old refugee from DRC living in Uganda. Building from her own experience of struggling to generate income to support her family, she founded Patapia – a bank for the unbankable. Patapia provides microloans for refugee women in Uganda to start their own businesses and become financially independent. A pilot has proven the social enterprise’s high potential to create impact while generating profits. To continuously scale the impact of Patapia, Aime needs around USD 200,000, but there are no funding options available to her.
Aime represents a growing number of entrepreneurs who founded promising social enterprises that have high impact and growth potential. Unfortunately, they lack access to funding to scale as they are at the periphery of capital markets: the people, places and topics that markets neglect. This is both a systemic failure and a moral outrage, and the Purpose Pool seeks to develop an alternative to address both. Our ambition is to prove that a human-centred, inclusive and regenerative investment model for impact entrepreneurs in underserved markets is viable: impactful, profitable and scalable.
Our solution
Our model is a community-powered impact venture platform, combining capacity building (enterprise skills training and coaching) with access to capital through an entrepreneur and impact-centric funding mechanism, the Purpose Pool. Both complement each other symbiotically.
Our capacity-building method focuses on fundamental entrepreneurial hard skills – business plan writing and financial modeling – and has been developed over more than a decade and successfully applied in dozens of incubator/accelerator programs serving hundreds of ventures on five continents. The Purpose Pool is a radically innovative model that seeks to overcome the key structural, economic, and justice issues currently blocking capital flow to the most impactful ventures in underserved markets. Taking inspiration from existing and proven models (e.g. peer selection, collective risk-pooling, purpose ownership, revenue-share finance, etc.) we have designed and piloted a model that empowers communities of founders (impact venture teams), funders (investors and grant-makers), and fixers (business coaches, facilitators) to collaborate and scale impact, profitably. The Purpose Pool model is based on several complementary principles:
The Purpose Pool Uganda is currently prototyped through SINA ltd without actual investors. The return of the enterprises are collected to validate the model but are fully reinvested into other Social Enterprises
Get in touch
For Social Enterprises
Are you a social enterprise in need for funding to scale your impact? Feel free to get in touch with us to receive more information about our next funding round.
For Funders
Are you interested in supporting social enterprises to scale their impact? Feel free o get in touch with us to receive more information about our model and opportunities to get involved.
Our Portfolio
Uganics
Uganics is an organization providing purely organic, mild scented mosquito repellent.
In Uganda, children below five years are the most affected with malaria. According to the Ugandan Ministry of Health, currently 90% of 100,000 recorded malaria deaths are children, especially from rural areas. The majority of rural communities do not have access to treated mosquito nets, and do not have access to preventive measures…
Generous Designs Africa
Generous Designs upcycles old aid tarpaulins into bags and local plastic recycling in the Bidibidi Refugee. Settlement
Generous Designs collects old tarpaulins from UNHCR or other aid agencies, which were given to arriving refugees for roofing. The sun is slowly destroying the plastic sheets and holes form and after a couple of years are thrown away. The social enterprise collects the sheets and uses the parts still in good condition as the base material for waterproof school bags for refugee children, handbags and shopping bags…
hjhfgghfghdfgdsfgsdfsf
Patapia
Patapia is an affordable microfinance and startup support for refugee women.
Patapia is a social enterprise addressing the challenges of economic inequalities for refugee women in Uganda. Through training and peer groups, women get access to affordable small-scale loans to lift themselves out of poverty. Patapia is a Swahili word that means “get also”. It is founded by Rebecca Aime, a Congolese refugee herself.