Kickstart International

• 35 years old.
• Member since February 8 2013.

• Personal Background

  KickStart is a non-profit social enterprise with a mission to lift millions of people in Africa out of poverty, quickly, cost-effectively and sustainably. KickStart succeeds by designing, promoting and mass-marketing simple money-making tools that small-holder farmers buy and use to start highly profitable family enterprises. These new businesses create a sustainable solution to the rural poor’s most important need —a way to make more money—and enable the farmers to lift their families out of poverty. KickStart is working to build a vibrant entrepreneurial middle class in Africa by designing new technologies that have the potential to enable millions of people to start profitable businesses. To ensure long-term sustainability, KickStart establishes a profitable private-sector supply chain that manufactures, distributes and sells the new technologies. It then uses donor funds to educate the entrepreneurs and farmers about the new opportunities, develop the market demand for the new technologies, measure the social impacts and design the next generation of products. Over time, as the new products become more widely known, the level of market development subsidies reduce and KickStart will leave in place a fully sustainable supply chain. To date more than 140,300 families have used KickStart products to establish dynamic and profitable family enterprises. Today more than 1,900 are starting new enterprises every month.