Institute for Business in the Global Context

Category: Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship: Fletcher X 4 at the Tufts $100K

This post originally appeared on the Fletcher Admissions Blog

This will be an exciting day for four teams of Fletcher students who are competing in the Tufts $100K New Ventures Competition. Four teams out of only 18 to reach the finals, in fact! The finalist teams will compete in three tracks — Social Impact; MedTech and Life Science; and General and High-Tech — with the pitching going on throughout the day. The competing teams all include, but aren’t limited to, members of the Tufts community.

The Fletcher teams are:

Edkasa, Winner of the 2018 Fletcher D-Prize with $30,000 in cash and in-kind support services!
Team Members: Sohail Ali, F19; Bakhtawar Ali, F19; Fahad Tanveer; Annum Sadiq
Venture description: Pakistan has 15 million out of school secondary students. Of those who are in school, nearly half do not graduate. Using a live, virtual learning platform, EDKASA makes “rock star” teachers accessible to secondary students in Pakistan at an affordable cost.

M-tuma
Team Members: Faith Biegon, F18; Collins Sirmah, A16; Bryson Wong, A17
Venture description: Dukas, “Mom and Pop stores,” play a critical role in Kenya’s economy. They supply roughly 70 percent of the country’s consumer goods and are often run by women or families. These shop owners lack information on prices, travel long distances to wholesalers, and incur high transportation costs. We are building an online system where shopkeepers can view prices and make orders. We then aggregate orders from multiple shopkeepers and rely on third-party transporters to deliver goods utilizing economies of scale. Shop keepers now know prices, get goods at their doorsteps, and save on transportation costs. Continue reading

Menghan Li, ComeOnGirls, Win 2017 Fletcher D-Prize

May 1, 2017 / IBGC / 0 Comments

Menghan Li (F18) first realized she wanted to fight poverty while she was working with rural children. These children had been abandoned, not only because their parents needed to find employment, but also because they were female. “I started to think about how a special group of people — rural girls — suffer from dual disadvantages from the society — one from their background, the other from their gender,” Li recalls.

When she heard about The Fletcher School and The Institute for Business in the Global Context’s (IBGC) partnership with D-Prize, which awards up to $20,000 to fund new ventures that fight poverty in Africa, Asia or other developing regions, Li knew what her project would be: women’s education. Li won over the judges with her ComeOnGirls scholarship platform, and was recently announced as the 2017 Fletcher D-Prize winner.

Menghan Li (middle) receives the Fletcher D-Prize award from (left to right) Dean James Stavridis, Dorothy Orszulak, Bhaskar Chakravorti, and Marilyn Davison (and her dog, Chili!)

ComeOnGirls is a nonprofit that works to alleviate poverty by improving women’s education. The pilot program will launch in Western China —where Li says two-thirds of female students drop out of school — and she hopes to expand to other countries like Brazil and India. “We want to help remove the financial barrier and gender discrimination in secondary education by awarding scholarships,” she says. “The girls we select must demonstrate outstanding academic performance or special talents, and the drive to change their own lives as well as to contribute to the long-term development of the local community.”

Charles Dokmo (F14) Co-Founds Kumwe: The Future of African Freight

September 20, 2016 / IBGC / 0 Comments

What’s it like to launch a social venture in a low-income country and have real world impact?

Picture this: 10 tons of maize grown by 8000 different smallholder farms in Rwanda, all trying to get to market in Kigali. The challenge? The crops are here; the markets are there. Lack of access to reliable, efficient, and transparent transportation means farmers struggle to get their goods to customers. Spoilage, delays, and lost shipments all come at great costs.

That’s where Kumwe comes in.

Co-founded by Fletcher alumnus Charles Dokmo (F’14) as part of a team of supply chain engineers from MIT, Kumwe aims to create a ground transportation brokerage to serve as “the connective tissue” between shippers, including farmers and transporters. The brokerage is intended to ensure professional, reliable and affordable freight transportation, all while lowering costs and improving efficiency in getting goods to markets for small farmers and other shippers.

Back in the summer of 2013, Dokmo completed a Blakeley-funded summer internship in Chad following his first year as a MALD student. “This is where I experienced first-hand the challenge of last-mile distribution,” said Dokmo. “I was helping a small biomass charcoal and cookstove pilot project become financially sustainable when I discovered the largest barrier to profitability was a lack of predictable, affordable transportation.” This sparked the idea of Kumwe, which turned into a reality after Dokmo graduated from Fletcher.

May 12, 2016

Speakers:

Fadi Ghandour, Founder of Aramex
Dr.Bhaskar Chakravorti, Senior Associate Dean for International Business and Finance and director of the Institute for Business in the Global Context (IBGC) at the Fletcher School
Dr.Ibrahim Warde, Adjunct Professor of International Business at the Fletcher School and Associate Director of the Fares Center of Eastern Mediterranean Studies
Nadim Shehadi, Director of the Fares Center of Eastern Mediterranean Studies

Jordanian entrepreneurFadi Ghandour founded Aramex, an international express, mail delivery and logistics services company based in Dubai, in 1982. It has since grown into a major business entity operating throughout the MENA region and beyond. In this lecture and discussion, Mr. Ghandour and a Fletcher panel including Bhaskar Chakravorti, Ibrahim Warde and Nadim Shehadi will analyze the role that business and entrepreneurship play in creating change in the region.

What Is Entrepreneurship? Fletcher Entrepreneur in Residence, Rockford Weitz, Has the Answer

September 28, 2015 / IBGC / 0 Comments

With the 3rd Annual Fletcher D-Prize Poverty Solutions Venture Competition launching on September 28th, the entrepreneurial ecosystem at Fletcher is on full display. With so many great opportunities available, we first have to answer one question: What exactly do we mean when we say entrepreneurship?

Luckily, The Fletcher School’s Entrepreneurship Coach (and Entrepreneur in Residence), Rockford Weitz, has the answer.

What is Entrepreneurship?

Good question. Entrepreneurship means different things to different people. I define entrepreneurship as “problem solving with limited resources and an unclear path forward.” By my definition, most of you will likely be entrepreneurs at some point during your career.

The entrepreneurial approach works well in many Fletcher career trajectories, including social entrepreneurship, tech-driven entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship (using entrepreneurship techniques to succeed as a change agent in large organizations in the private, public, non-profit, intergovernmental and academic sectors).

Fletcher students and alumni have launched and scaled numerous enterprises, including non-profits, technology startups and new offices within larger organizations, such as the United Nations or the U.S. State Department.

SponsorHer!: Improving Access to Education for Teenage Girls in Ethiopia

September 22, 2015 / IBGC / 0 Comments

What’s it like to launch a social venture in a low-income country and have real world impact?

Fourteen-year-old Senait lives in a one-room house in Gondar with her mother, father and seven siblings. Currently in the eighth grade, she dreams of one day becoming a doctor to help others throughout Ethiopia, and is ready to accept and challenge any difficulties that stand in her way.

Throughout Ethiopia, young girls like Senait struggle in a system where failure far outpaces success. Poverty rates are sky high, while access to education is among the worst in the world. Just 18 percent of women over 15 are literate and less than five percent graduate secondary school. Out of 127 countries in UNESCO’s “Education for All” Index, Ethiopia ranks 126^th.

As stark a picture as the numbers paint, solutions to pull girls out of poverty do exist; the problem is finding a way to bring them to those who need it most. Fletcher alumna Viola Csordas (F09) saw the problems and the solutions, but needed a push to help bring them together.

That’s where the Fletcher D-Prize came in.