What is the name of your organization?
Apexah Frontiers (Pty) Ltd
What is the name of your solution?
Bizres
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
Supporting resilience of microbusinesses in fragile regional through digital transformation
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Colombo, Sri Lanka
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
Sri Lanka
What type of organization is your solution team?
Hybrid of for-profit and nonprofit
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
The impact of external shocks such as climate change, conflict, epidemics and governance failures on micro-businesses is significant. Therefore, there is an urgent and deep need to solve the problem of poor resilience of micro-enterprises to external shocks to improve employment and incomes of people in fragile regions. The United Nations has noted that micro-businesses are disproportionately affected by climate change. According to the World Bank, conflicts can significantly reduce GDP growth, with micro-enterprises being among the hardest hit due to their limited capacity to absorb shocks. Recent high-profile examples of crises such as the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine, climate disasters in the Pacific, the Mekong region, governance related crises in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the COVID epidemic globally have highlighted the vulnerability of microbusinesses. The closure of microbusinesses due to these crises not only had debilitating effects on poor families but also lead to severe supply chain disruptions for whole global industries. Importantly, external shocks are becoming more frequent, long-lasting and novel. The demand for business resilience support is high, but despite the need for urgent resilience support to micro-businesses, relevant digital tools to support resilience of micro-businesses are inadequate or non-existent.
What is your solution?
At the height of the COVID crises in late 2020, we developed the Bizres App to help micro-businesses to bring structure to their efforts to remain resilient. We then successfully pilot tested the product from 2021-2024. We are not aware of any other such App available globally to support low income, micro and small entrepreneurs in vulnerable contexts. This initiative was therefore highly innovative and a breakthrough in terms of support to micro-businesses and resilience support. BizRes is designed to analyse the existing levels of vulnerability and resilience of micro and small businesses to external shocks such as climate disasters, conflict, epidemics and governance failures in a simple but comprehensive format. It also supports businesses to gather the information to develop resilience plans and monitor their progress in developing those plans. Bizres is relevant for a large range of contexts that may face external shocks. Moreover, recommendations on the type of measures to be adopted in preparation for unforeseen or during unexpected external events are not static and can be changed or further refined. It is currently available in three languages Sinhala, Tamil or English. Other languages can be added as needed.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
The target group for our work is predominantly women-led micro-entrepreneurs who are running their businesses in fragile and underdeveloped regions that face external shocks. They do not have tools and support to improve their resilience and therefore their businesses face significant losses or close. The loss of income and closure of these businesses often leads to reduced employment and incomes for poor and disadvantaged people working at these businesses and overall economic deterioration of the regional economies through the disruption of value chains.
After training beneficiaries on the importance of business resilience we will provide a structured and easy to use means of understanding their vulnerability and resilience to external shocks through an App that than can be downloaded onto their phones. The tool helps to gather the information needed to develop a resilience plan. Furthermore, our solution will guide them to develop a simple resilience plan that can be used and adapted depending on her/his circumstances. The overall solution reduces the risk of failure of microbusinesses and makes them more bankable and better able to access micro-insurance. Beneficiaries commented that our solution was highly relevant, simple, easy to use and sensitive to their challenges of technology adoption.
