When India was devastated by disasters, we asked everyone to put their hand in someone else's pocket.
Our (social) entrepreneurial journey started off in October 1999 when there was a devastating cyclone in the state of Odisha (India) with over a million losing lives and 13 million their livelihoods overnight. In under 24 hours, our founders put together the world's first crowdsourcing campaign Causeaneffect.org to raise US$1.5 million in 45 days engaging over 18 million people from 50 countries to support the disaster relief victims.
With the courage and confidence gained from this, our founders kick started their entrepreneurial journey to leverage digital technologies to solve some of the grand challenges the world is facing.
We don't need all the answers to solve the problems.
With a child like curiosity and bold thinking to solve some of the world's most pressing challenges, we spent the last decade listening to the communities who are living in extreme poverty across Africa and South Asia. With an intentionality to drive systems change, we took a bottoms up approach to co-create with the users and incrementally build what is working and discard what is not.
First to admit, we do not have all the answers. We are bringing together the ecosystem actors to collaboratively work on this grand challenge together.
Extreme conditions are fertile soil for extreme innovation.
We are rewriting the rules of the game by creating a dependable network of frontline rural leaders through our Rural Entrepreneur Development Incubators (REDI). Equipped with a portable digital toolkit with hyper local curated advisory content, the frontline staff engage their local communities to create immersive learning experiences without the need for internet or power. They earn the community trust, capture their needs and coordinate with the service providers to deliver quality inputs, credit and markets for a fee.
We are creating sustainable rural communities built on trust across Africa and South Asia.
Empowering ordinary people to do extraordinary things.
We are reimagining the future of work by engaging the rural youth, assessing their skills, interests, talents and aspirations and enrolling them to the Kuza Leadership Academy program to build their business, technical, and leadership skills. As members of Kuza OneNetwork they get access to structured deals, discounts, service level contracts, and opportunities to earn sustainable income.
The transformative scale we are witnessing is an outcome of our deliberate design to invest in people, processes, and exponential digital technologies to create sustainable rural communities.
It took us 20 years to become an overnight success.
Decades of our efforts to convene, catalyze, and co-create sustainable solutions with private, public and developmental actors hit a tipping point in 2022. With 6.2 million lives directly impacted and 155,000 new jobs created in the past six years, we are demonstrating that systemic change is possible using business as a force for good.
We believe our journey has just begun. If you feel equally passionate about some of these grand challenges and want to partner with us or join this passionate team, reach out to us.
