Raising capital is not as easy at it looks especially for startup entrepreneurs in Africa, where investors put their money into fast moving consumer goods, oil and real estate among others apart from upcoming entrepreneurs.
To help solve this, Nailab, a tech business incubator in partnership with 1%Club, a Netherlands based crowdfunding platform and Accenture a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company are conducting a 2-day crowd funding boot camp to take the local entrepreneurs through the process.
The boot camp will see 7 start-ups in different business sectors create a crowdfunding campaign that will demonstrate their start-up’s ability to develop solid crowdfunding plans, display a map of relevant networks and show insight in successful storytelling. The winning campaign will be awarded a grand prize of Ksh. 300,000 on Thursday 27th March at 4:00pm. The funds will help boost their venture on start- up capital.
Speaking at the event Gijsbert Koren, a Netherlands based Crowdfunding Researcher said,”Crowdfunding is a way of validation and promotion of a business as it shows investors your idea is viable. It helps investors to believe in your product however, one should launch a crowdfunding campaign after proof of concept.”
Koren adds that crowdfunding works because the backers believe they own the project, will be rewarded and the backers have little control in the manufacturing or other risky processes but unlike banks, backers always know what their money is doing.
Nailab which has over five startups participating also plans to launch a pan-African crowdfunding platform dubbed Babandu, to help entrepreneurs in Africa raise money for their projects online. TechMoran has not learned yet, how different Babandu will be but believe it will address the payments problem many entrepreneurs face in Africa by integrating mobile money payment options, which are becoming so popular in Africa since the launch of M-Pesa in Kenya in 2007.