Our Alumni

Empowering African entrepreneurs with business skills.

Grow Movement unlocks the potential of entrepreneurs in Uganda, Rwanda and Malawi by matching them with volunteer business consultants from around the world. Together they work for 6 months over Skype and mobile, identifying ways to improve the business, increase profitably and create employment. Since GROW started, over 500 entrepreneurs have started on our programme, increasing their finance, marketing and strategy skills and creating over 680 new full or part time jobs.

How we do it
We work with local partners in each operational country to identify micro, small and medium entrepreneurs that require additional business support. Each entrepreneur is interviewed face to face by a local Grow manager, who seeks to understand their business and any skills gaps. Once accepted onto the programme, the entrepreneur’s knowledge gap is matched with the key strengths of one of our volunteer consultants. Each volunteer consultant undergoes a similar process, where they are interviewed by the local Grow manager and their areas of expertise are identified.

Why we do it

Micro, small and medium businesses represent the backbone of local economies in most developing countries. They are vehicles for accelerating economic growth, generating employment, foreign exchange and tax revenues. In Uganda alone, they contribute 75% of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). However, these small enterprises face unique challenges which limit their full potential to contribute to their country’s economy. Most businesses work without proper planning, have poor accounting and financial records, limited customer care, no strategy for costing and pricing their services/ products and work with a short term outlook and vision.

By connecting volunteer consultants with entrepreneurs, we can accelerate the economic performance of these businesses by plugging these knowledge gaps. Over Skype, phone and email, solutions can be found by sharing the business expertise of our volunteer consultants with the local knowledge of our entrepreneurs. Grow Movement aims to balance out the life lottery that has prevented our entrepreneurs from being able to access the right skills training to be able to run their businesses as effectively as possible.

Claire tells us what Grow Movement do and what their plans for the next five years are, in this short video.

Here, Claire shares her top tip that she took from her meeting with John. You need to consider PR at the same time as fundraising, they go hand in hand.