Congo Clothing Company

48 women are raped every hour in the Democratic Republic of Congo partly due to our consumption of electronics and batteries. Currently, there is no mainstream mitigation mechanism and people are largely disconnected from the issue. Worse yet, when survivors overcome the trauma their resourcefulness and creativity is overlooked. 

We are creating the first of its kind solution that unlocks value by sourcing authentic creative assets from women in the Congo. Our proprietary application collects and organizes their creative output and our image and generative AI model fine tunes it to produce output for the direct to consumer and enterprise apparel market. 

We serve survivors of sexual violence and their families. They represent a substantial population of the nearly 6.17 million internally displaced people in the Democratic Republic of Congo. They are underserved because they have lost their homes and face social stigma when trying to reintegrate into society. Our solution will help them gain some measure of financial independence by providing them with the infrastructure to monetize their art work. It is important to stress that it need not be professional creative assets as our initial testing shows that customers are willing to pay even for assets that simply possess intrinsic narrative value.  

Andrea is our Chief Product Officer. She is full-time with the company and handles our sourcing, product design and supply chain. She previously headed her own design studio and her academic research focused on toxic masculinity. 

Rithvik is our technical lead. He is a current Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Student at MIT. He has experience as a software developer and machine learning engineer. He's also been active in the Alzheimer's space, creating mobile apps.

I am a serial entrepreneur with experience scaling ventures. I left my role as CEO of my latest company Flashstay after scaling it to over $1 million in sales to pursue a Master's of political science at MIT. My research explored the intersection between public policy and entrepreneurship. I have prior experience in banking, energy and government with Citigroup, Total Energies and the Democratic National Committee.

We have the right mix of business, creative, technology, and public policy expertise required to execute our vision. In addition, we have proven, with very limited resources, that we have a great ability to create strategic relationships and engage a broad range of stakeholders. This is exemplified by our partnership with 2018 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Dr Denis Mukwege and his Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, Congo. He is widely considered to be the global authority on the issue of gender-based violence. Furthermore, a 2022 United Nations white paper highlighted the benefits of our innovative model and we are discussing deployment in refugee camps all across the country.

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First, we hope that the Solve network can connect us to potential mentors who have a passion for social entrepreneurship. We also hope that Solve can help us connect to technical innovators who can help us validate some of our assumptions, scale our experiments and deploy are technology more widely. Finally we hope that solve can help us engage corporate partners, particularly those at the center of the electric revolution, and challenge them to actively engage with us and the communities we are supporting as part of a renewed commitment to corporate social responsibility. 

We partner with 2018 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Dr. Denis Mukwege to supportive creative workshops for survivors of sexual violence. By focusing on training and up-skilling we place the emphasis on resilience. Our proprietary application enables digitization and monetization of artwork at scale. We also leverage the latest advances in AI and machine learning in our design workflows. This solution could catalyze broader positive impact by connecting a previously marginalized population to the digital economy and its broad base of opportunities. It could change the market by democratizing access to authentic creative output from Congo. 

Our creative workshops last 180 days and cost $100 per attendees. For the next year we plan to provide 55 000 days of training corresponding to support for 305 women. Upon completing our training and integration on the application we hope that they can generate an average of $200 per year per user the first year following adoption and ramping up at a rate of 50% per each year after with a plateau around $3000, about half of DRC's GDP/capita. Given that the app would primarily constitute an alternative stream of income, when paired with another activity this should put many women way above the country's GDP's per capita of $500/month. In 5 years, we anticipate to see large scale adoption with an estimated 500 000 people using our system and a further 3 million indirectly benefiting through rippling effects. 

We are using the number of training days we are providing women as our top line indicator currently. We are also measuring the number of dollars being paid out via the app to individual users. We are working with political scientists at MIT to develop impact assessment methods to determine how to best calculate the total community impact. 

We use a react native application for the creator facing solution. It is optimized for android which is the most widely used operating system in Africa. We also use our own fine tuning AI models, reinforcement models as well as generative AI models. We have also developed an impact dashboard that allows us to aggregate customer's impact overtime and gamify their altruism with a leader board. Data is at the center of our offering across all touch points. 

We are a team of 3 diverse founders. Andrea is a woman identifying creative leader from Venezuela. Rithvik our tech lead is a male identifying machine learning engineer from India and the United States. I'm a black male identifying serial entrepreneur from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Diversity is on our DNA. 

We are using a B2B2C approach wherein we are targeting conscious end users aged 25-35 with a bachelor's degree or higher via key decision makers at companies that take their corporate social responsibility and style seriously. We generate revenue by tapping into their demand for unique designs in apparel. Those companies need clothing multiple times on a yearly basis for corporate gifting, building company culture, or for marketing. We charge them for design fees as well as for the goods they order. We command a high price point because of the strength of our social mission, the cool factor of our brand and the quality of our products. Once end users receive Congo Clothing Company products from a corporation, a substantial percentage of them turn into paid customers of our direct line where they have access to a wide range of intricate designs and style options. 

We meet our end customers on multiple touch points. We connect with them through selling merchandising to their corporations, online via our e-commerce website and in person through experiences and pop-ups. We are also building a network of influencers and campus ambassadors who are incentivized through a highly effective referral program. We have build a formidable flywheel wherein our B2B model reinforces our B2C offering and vice versa. 

We have generated over $150 000 in revenues organically since inception. We have received over $45 000 in non dilutive funding.