From Envisage to Ambitious Africa
The Finnish Rwandan management team and members. Learn more about the team at www.envisageincubators.com
The team of Finns and Rwandans behind Rwanda’s first agri start-up incubators, Envisage Incubators, used insights gained from the project to start Ambitious Africa - a global initiative connecting keen young entrepreneurs across Africa and the Nordics to solve societal problems together. This is the story of how Ambitious Africa came to be.
One evening two master’s students at Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki sat down on a couch at the Hanken Business Lab, the school’s own start-up incubator, to contemplate their futures. For their final semester, Victor Lindahl and Vincent Forsman had to choose between an internship or a foreign exchange, yet neither of those options felt right. Together they decided to find their own business opportunity. They used their access to large networks of young entrepreneurs and students in Finland as their starting point.
Vincent had been the president of the Hanken Entrepreneurship Society between 2017-2019. Victor succeeded him and stayed on the post until December last year. Their network of bright young minds form a grassroots entrepreneurial ecosystem where all initiatives are student-led. A lot of support is offered to the young Finnish innovators within this network through the existing startups ecosystem, corporations as well as the government and academia.
When Victor and Vincent sparked a discussion with Rwandan Hanken PhD student named Theogene Habimana they learned that although Rwanda has an abundance of highly skilled and driven young academics and entrepreneurs unemployment rates are at 28% among Rwandans with university degrees. They also learned 75% of sub-Saharan Africans work with agriculture (in Finland it is only 3,5%).
By innovating within the agricultural industry in Rwanda, they concluded, they could create more employment opportunities for unemployed graduates. They could simultaneously tackle malnourishment, where inefficient agriculture methods and tools is a big part of the problem.
- This is not cancer without a cure. The solutions already exist in the Nordic countries, Victor said.
Theogene gathered a team of entrepreneurs and academics from Rwanda and brought them to Finland. Victor, Vincent and Theogene took them to visit the leading start-ups, incubators and accelerators in Helsinki. At Victor’s cottage the visitors received the full Finnish sauna and lake experience while ideating their plan to launch incubators in Rwanda, which were named ‘Envisage Incubators’.
Victor and Vincent went to Rwanda for the first time in the spring of 2019 to look for partners and get a sense of the country’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. They returned a month later to set up the first incubator with the purpose to give ambitious young Rwandans a space to meet and combine skills to solve local problems.
Envisage Incubators has two agri-incubators in Rwanda now and is expanding to Uganda. The incubators in Rwanda are home to local startups such as HydroFeeds, Smartagri and K-Drones. Hydrofeeds helps farmers grow their own animal feed in their backyards. This reduces their costs by over 50% because it spares them from having to buy expensive imported feed. Smartagri helps farmers optimise their water usage and increase crop yield. K-Drones works to minimise the harmful effects of pesticides.
The work which started in Rwanda has paved the way for something bigger - the Ambitious Africa initiative, which is launching globally on May 26th. The founders of Envisage Incubators realised there is more to be achieved across Africa and that they could build on relationships built in Rwanda with Envisage Incubators. They saw a potential for impacting more societies in Africa through creating opportunities for ambitious African entrepreneurs to build on their strengths and by connecting them with young talent in the Nordics too.
The success of the Envisage Incubators has attracted entrepreneur moguls Peter Vesterbacka (founder of leading tech conference Slush) and Richard von Kaufmann (founder of Pricetap) to back Ambitious Africa and act as mentors for the new initiative. But why now?
- COVID-19 has been a nightmare for many. For us, it became an opportunity. With everyone suddenly online we could connect participants from all countries across Africa and in the Nordics through online events, Ronny Eriksson said, another driver of the projects who is completing his Master’s at Hanken School of Economics.