African Entrepreneur Collective (AEC)

My name is Nathalie Niyonzima, Managing Director of African Entrepreneur Collective (AEC) in Rwanda.

I was born and raised in Burundi. As a result of civil war, hundreds of thousands of Burundians fled as political violence makes our home and our lives unstable. 80,000 of us came Rwanda as refugees.

We need help, but we are not helpless.

My fellow Burundians living as refugees do not want aid, they want the opportunity and skills to support themselves and their families in this new country, and the resources to get started. 

That's what I do at AEC, along with a multicultural team of 140 business advisors and consultants from across East Africa. We are proving to the world that refugees can be contributors, not economic drains on their new host communities. 

As a CPA, my previous roles include finance and strategy positions for a variety of international NGOs in Rwanda.

Africa is host to 26% of the world’s refugee population; more than any other continent.

80% of refugees seek safety in a neighboring country, creating an economic and unemployment burden for the host.

Traditional aid provides handouts keeping refugees in a cycle of dependency, leading to lack of dignity, choice, and the chance for sustainable change.

Refugees need help, but they're not helpless.

AEC supports refugees with business development services and access to low-cost debt capital so that they can improve their livelihoods and create jobs for others in their communities.

Over the next four years, AEC will serve 35,000 refugee entrepreneurs, generating $65M additional revenue in refugee communities and creating at least 110,000 new jobs for other refugees and host community residents.

By leveraging the talents of refugee entrepreneurs we will demonstrate that refugees are not burdens, but an untapped resource needed to drive economic development across the continent.

One percent of all of humanity, 79M people, is forcibly displaced. As the refugee crisis grows globally, the humanitarian funding available to support diminishes.

Africa is host 26% of global refugees. And, 78% of refugees live in that host country for at least 5 years.

Africa is also a continent with a ballooning unemployment problem. The population is expected to double in the next 25 years, but there will only be about 100M new jobs, less than 20% of jobs needed for this growing cadre of working people. 

The solution to the growing refugee crisis in Africa, and Africa's growing jobs need is the same: refugee entrepreneurs. 

Refugees have the potential to contribute widely to Africa's economic development and reduce the burden on host countries and humanitarian funding. However, they currently lack the dedicated support need to do so. 

UNHCR's 2017 refugee assessment revealed that refugees need assistance with livelihoods and income generation to support themselves or move outside of the camp. AEC’s assessments identify gaps in business skills and access to financing.

So far, AEC has served 13,000 refugee entrepreneurs, and there are hundreds of thousands more across the continent.  

AEC supports refugee and host community entrepreneurs, existing and potential, to launch and grow businesses.

We do this by providing each entrepreneur a comprehensive suite business trainings, individual consulting, easy-to-use tracking tools, and direct access to low-cost debt capital. All of our programming focuses on the key drivers of business growth: financial management, increasing sales, operational efficiency, and access to new markets. 

Entrepreneurs participate in cohorts lasting about 5 months, and that are mixed with refugees and host community members to foster integration.

Our 2019 cohorts of 2,500 participants (51% women) across 10 locations in Rwanda and Kenya achieved the following results:

91% satisfaction rate, led to 77% increased their business knowledge and 72% keep financial records frequently now. This resulted in 122% average revenue increase generating $13.9M USD of new revenues in refugee communities. 64% of participants purchased new assets, and collectively they created 2,697 new jobs. Remarkably, 50% of all jobs created were filled by members of the host communities.

In addition, AEC has disbursed more 800 loans. With a 98% repayment rate, we are demonstrating that businesses in refugee communities are just as investable as any other.

AEC has offices in all six refugee camps in Rwanda, and in one in Kenya. In these locations we support camp-based entrepreneurs and host community members who live within 10km of the camps. We also support urban refugees in three cities. 

In Rwanda, about 50% of our participants are from Burundi, arriving in 2015. The other 50% are Congolese, the first arriving in 1995. The camps range in size from 8,000 - 55,000 residents. In Kenya, we work in the Kakuma Refugee Camp, home to 190,000 refugees mostly from South Sudan, Somalia, and Ethiopia. 

We started working with refugees in Rwanda in 2016, just at the time when UNHCR and WFP transitioned away from monthly food donations to cash stipends, turning refugees into market-based consumers. AEC helped businesses become reliable suppliers of basic goods, building out the supply side of the markets.

Refugees' voices are key to our program. 25% of our staff are refugees themselves, and 70% of the staff are based in refugee communities. We host frequent focus groups and solicit feedback through surveys, anonymous phone lines, and suggestion boxes. These elements are essential for community trust, and we have changed our programs as a result of feedback.

Many people view refugees as social burdens who have nothing to offer and who are left to sitting in a tent waiting for peace to return to their home country or to fly off to another country if you're one of the 3% who are resettled. 

To us, refugees are assets. Our model is not a charity, but an economic development one which features refugees as clients -- allowing them choice, skin in the game, and mutual accountability.

We want to show the world that refugees can contribute to economic development for their new community.

As a Burundian, I have seen thousands of my community flee as political violence which makes our homes and our lives unstable. Many of us have come to Rwanda, and the first time I visited a refugee camp, I saw my whole nation in the camp. I know that my people do not want aid - they want the right to work, the resources to get started, and the skills to navigate the laws and practices of their new country. Additionally, many of my colleagues at AEC were born in exile or are one degree from being refugees themselves.

AEC first started working with Rwandan SMEs to create jobs in the country. In 2016, we were approached by UNHCR to work with refugee entrepreneurs. I took the option to our team, asking if we should, and it was a unanimous yes.

AEC self-funded our first program with refugees, wanting to test and iterate solutions in line with our values. Fast forward to today, the same commitment to being lean, practical, and connected to refugees is why we are the right team to execute.

As of today, 97% of AEC clients are refugee entrepreneurs living in and around refugee camps.

I was born and raised in Burundi, a small country located in East Africa. My country was torn by civil war from 1993 to 2005.

In 2015, 10 years after the signature of a peace accord that was supposed to bring back peace in my country, a similar situation persists and the government has done little to offer equal opportunities to youth, but instead keeps fueling tensions among communities. Youth were at the center of the conflict, and politicians used them to instill and disseminate divisionism and hatred messages. Being hateful was the key to get access to opportunities. As a result of an outburst of violence and divisive attacks, 80,000 Burundians were forced to exile in Rwanda.

As a young female leader, I know that the youth are the future of any country and if the aim is to find sustainable solutions to peace and alleviate poverty, we have to uplift each other and empower the youth through better education, mentorship and access to opportunities.

My work at AEC is a unique opportunity for me to support refugees, especially fellow Burundians living as refugees, to rebuild their lives in exile through entrepreneurship in Rwanda and globally.

I am passionate about changing the perception and narrative for refugees globally.

In my tenure as Managing Director, AEC has quickly become one of the largest and most recognized providers of business development services and the largest lender in refugee communities across the world. Since 2016, we have grown by more than 50% CAGR in participants, staff, and budget. In 2020, we are serving 3.6x increase over 2019, as we refined services for refugee communities, and achieved comparable impact in more complex markets as we expanded into new geographies. Our staff expansion now has cross-border roles, creating economies as we scale.

I have a multicultural team of 140 staff who come from across East Africa, with a variety of skillset in business advisory, consulting and lending. We provide our services in 9 languages.

At the UNHCR Global Refugee Forum in December 2019, we pledged to support 35,000 refugees by 2023 put us in the global top 10 pledges supporting refugee livelihoods. 

Given the sizable demand for our services, our effective and scalable model, and the shifting need from humanitarian to development interventions, the time is right for AEC to rapidly expand our refugee program.

In my role, I oversee program and operations, leveraging years of experience in strategy and finance working with international NGOs, including Help a Child Rwanda, FEWS NET (USAID Project) and Vision for a Nation Foundation. I am a CPA and hold a BBA in Accounting from the University of Rwanda.

The global COVID-19 pandemic, and the protective government measures to lockdown communities and restrict movement, has negatively impacted small businesses across the world, including refugee communities.

While COVID-19 is a looming threat in refugee communities, hunger is the immediate reality. 70% of our participants rely on the income from their businesses to meet their basic household needs. On average, our participants live in households of five, and their businesses employ four others.

I worked with my team to collect data on the impact of COVID-19 to our refugee entrepreneurs -- we found that 65% of businesses were still operational while 35% had closed. Although this was an extremely challenging time in my career, these businesses needed our support to stay operational and support the community.

I shared the immediate need of our refugee entrepreneurs with our partners. As a result, AEC secured $2.3M from Mastercard Foundation to disburse one-time grants to 3,500 entrepreneurs across Rwanda, to withstand the current environment, and to re-emerge post-Covid-19 stronger.

To ensure our entrepreneurs are also getting needed advisory service during this time, we adapted our services to Covid-19 realities, and 8,000+ of our entrepreneurs received weekly COVID-19-related business insights delivered in digital interfaces.

In 2020, we are serving 3.6x increase over 2019, and we have doubled staff every year for the past 3 years. 

As a young female leader, it was my first time to manage scale projects funded by major donors such as the US State Department's BPRM, Mastercard Foundation and many others. In the beginning, I was not sure I would succeed, and many people said that I was too young to lead a high growth organization.

Building on my career and educational achievements as a Burundian in Rwanda, I knew that if you give someone the tools to succeed and truly believe in them, people will do more than we could have even imagined. This became my motivation to take leadership responsibility, to invest in my team, and more importantly, to trust refugees because they are my people, my families and my community. As a result, refugee entrepreneurs have been our best clients yet -- our borrowers doubled their business revenue and educational spending, and increased family feeding by 8% in the first quarter of 2020 alone.

I am very proud of the impact that our team is making in refugee and host communities.

Providing business development support is not innovative, but offering it to massively overlooked populations, contextualized for refugee lives and business environment is. And, most importantly, we show up with a different mindset from the charity approach that has not succeeded. Here's why AEC is different from the status quo:

• AEC is the largest lender to refugee entrepreneurs in Africa, even though we have a small portfolio of just over 800 loans currently. But nobody else is doing this. Where other programs offer investment-readiness and match-making, refugee entrepreneurs are still confined by steep collateral requirements and predatory interest rates, and investors don't actually put money into these communities. AEC does.

• Many people view refugees as social burdens who have nothing to offer. To us, refugees are assets for any community. They deserve dignity and choices. Ours is not a charity model, but an economic development one which features refugees as clients -- allowing them choice, dignity, and mutual accountability. We customize our solutions for our clients, which is different than the standard one-size-fits-all humanitarian approach. 

• We believe that integration of refugee and host community is key to inclusive economic growth, and we foster this integration through both services and hiring practices. In each of the 7 camps where we work, we have integrated staff modeling this approach. We walk our talk, and have refugee, women, and African leadership.

AEC's theory of changes is simple: When local entrepreneurs have access to practical services focused on business growth and access to meaningful resources, they will improve their own livelihoods and contribute to economic development of their communities.  

Business skills lead to business growth leads to job creation. 

Additionally, AEC is a values-driven organization. Our values of purpose, achievement, improvement, bravery, and togetherness are core to our work:

- Purpose: We are a global leader providing practical tools so that our clients can grow.

- Achievement: We push ourselves to reach beyond what we think is possible.   

- Improvement: We are committed to continuous learning and growing.

- Bravery: We hold ourselves and our colleagues to high expectations.

- Turikumwe: We are together in this work, and hold each other up in hard times.

AEC has worked with more than 13,000 refugee entrepreneurs across East Africa, most of whom started businesses as a way to rebuild their lives. AEC has created tangible results with trust and respect.

CURRENT NUMBER: AEC is supporting 9,000 refugee entrepreneurs across 7 camps in Rwanda and Kenya. This is a 3.6x increase over 2019. 

IN ONE YEAR:  AEC will reach 11,600 refugee entrepreneurs in 2021 Rwanda, Kenya and will begin serving refugee businesses in Ethiopia by Q3 2021. 

IN FIVE YEARS: AEC will reach 35,000+ refugee entrepreneurs across five countries. These entrepreneurs will generate $65M additional revenue circulating into refugee communities and create at least 110,000+ new jobs. 

Given the sizable demand for our services, our effective and scalable model, and the shifting need from humanitarian to development interventions, the time is right for AEC to rapidly expand our refugee entrepreneurship program. We have a proven model, and are ready to scale.

AEC has quickly become one of the largest and most recognized providers of business development services in refugee communities across the world. At the UNHCR Global Refugee Forum in December 2019, our pledge to support 35,000+ refugees put us in the global top 10 (out of 200+) pledges supporting refugee livelihoods.

Within the next 4 years, AEC will reach 100% of households in Rwanda, expand through Kenya, launch in Ethiopia, and open new programs with a partner in Lebanon and Jordan.

To amplify impact in expansion, we will establish physical offices in new program sites, supported by centralized business functions in Rwanda, iterating programs for local culture and linguistic context, led by local staff who can navigate contexts/stakeholders. Our cost-per-client has decreased over the past few years, and we are leveraging technology for efficiency.

The top five risks we note today are:

• Uptake of program components as we modify to meet the local context; 
• Maintaining AEC culture as we expand from a small organization to a multi-country one; 
• Transfer of knowledge from a different operating context;
• Legal restrictions/policies that prevent refugees from working; and
• Funding for start-up capital in each new site.

Before deciding to expand, we completed a risk assessment to identify challenges and opportunities. As with any new program in a new context, we anticipate snags and are committed to learning from those we can’t yet foresee.

The top five risks and proposed solutions we note today are:

• Uptake of program components -- leverage human centered design principles with clients for meaningful iteration;
• Maintain AEC culture -- embed existing staff to new site, connect peer-to-peer across geography;
• Transfer of knowledge from a different operating context -- decide what is crucial through M&E and modify as needed, embrace learning; and
• Legal restrictions/policies -- build stakeholder engagement with govt, hire locally.
• Funding -- AEC has already raised 24% of our 2020 – 2022 budget, and we are looking for partners to provide general operating support over the next four years.

While there are new challenges in new environments, we have the grit, staff capacity, and systems required to develop new practices to ensure our staff, clients, and partners are safe and meeting our stated objectives.

AEC knows this work is too hard to do alone, and we have much to learn from others. Therefore, we rely on stakeholder relationships to effectively deliver our expected results. AEC’s partners include the governments of Rwanda and Kenya, UNHCR, US State Dept (PRM), Mastercard Foundation, Ikea Foundation and more. We partner with:

- Mastercard Foundation to give one-time cash grants to more than 4,000 micro and small businesses in and around refugee camps.

- Ikea Foundation and Vitol Foundation to provide business growth through capacity building and access to finance to more than 4,500 micro and small businesses in and around refugee camps in Rwanda and Kenya.

- Kiva to adapt digital solutions to scale loans to refugee borrowers.

- US State Dept (PRM) to provide business growth through capacity building and access to finance to more than 8,000 micro and small businesses in and around refugee camps in Rwanda.

Through direct feedback from refugee entrepreneurs and countless studies on financial inclusion, starting and sustaining a business is essential to achieve financial independence, improve livelihoods, and create jobs. While there are many refugee savings or vocational programs, there is a huge gap in hard business skills and access to meaningful capital for refugee entrepreneurs.

AEC’s business model is based on our theory of change -- when local entrepreneurs have access to practical services focused on business growth and access to meaningful resources, they will improve their own livelihoods and contribute to economic development of their communities. 

We provide business training through a comprehensive program of 1:1 consulting and training; affordable loans, and networking opportunities for refugee entrepreneurs to build thriving businesses, improve lives, create new jobs and contribute to their communities' economic development.

We predict that more than 90% of our operating costs will be covered through philanthropic contributions. Our donors range from individual donors and small family foundations to larger foundations, corporations, and governments.

In addition, we charge a small interest fee on our loan fund, but at present this earned revenue doesn't cover too much of the budget. However, this will grow substantially in the coming years. 

AEC's 3-year program budget to serve refugee entrepreneurs in 5 countries is roughly $25M USD.

The following organizations have committed to our 2020-2022 strategic plan:

US State Department PRM - $2.2M

Mastercard Foundation - $3.8M

Ikea Foundation - $2.4M

Anonymous Donor - $675K

Small family foundations - $500k

AEC has already raised 24% of our 2020 – 2022 budget, and we are looking for partners to provide general operating support over the next four years, and we need additional partners to raise additional $20.5M USD grant funding to support this initiative over the next 4 years.

AEC's 2020 organizational expenses is approximately $6M USD, including $2.3M USD in one-time, direct-to-entrepreneur covid-relief grant funding.

Africa is also a continent with a ballooning unemployment problem. The population is expected to double in the next 25 years, but there will only be about 100M new jobs, less than 20% of jobs needed for this growing cadre of working people. 

The solution to the growing refugee crisis in Africa, and Africa's growing jobs need is the same: refugee entrepreneurs. 

Within the next 4 years, our goals are to:

• Become the best in the world at providing relevant and impactful business development support to refugee entrepreneurs; and
• Demonstrate that refugee entrepreneurs are just as investable as any other by disbursing 6,300+ loans and expecting a 98% repayment rate.

Funding is one of our barriers to achieve our big dreams.

The Elevate Prize will be a huge support to our goal of serving 100% of households in Rwanda, expand through Kenya (2020-21), launch in Ethiopia (2021), and open new programs with a partner in Lebanon and Jordan (2023); reaching 35,000 refugee entrepreneurs. Extrapolating our previous results, we project that these entrepreneurs will generate $65M additional revenue circulating into their local communities and create at least 110,000 new jobs for other refugees and host communities.

The Elevate Prize will be a huge support for AEC to hit our goals by:

- Learning, through coaching, from other industry thought leaders who are elevating humanity through the Foundation Network.

- Showing the world that refugees are not inherently a drain on communities, but that they can contribute to economic development for their new community as well, through marketing and campaigns.

- Getting access to funding to scale our impactful program through the Foundation Network.

AEC’s is looking for partners whose focus is to provide relevant and practical skills and resources to help entrepreneurs grow their businesses, achieve financial sustainability, and create jobs.