Most of what we do at Fledge is invisible. You can catch glimpses of the business planning and financial modeling at Demo Day, but the only visible changes we make are in the (re)branding. We re-branded Chabana Farms as Kalahari Honey, to make their newfound focus on honey explicit. God Cares Farm is now Oreeggs. Now their focus is clear too, and their name distinct. We found a name for our...
Monday, April 29th begins the fourteenth session of Fledge. Or is it the 17th? Or 61st? You’d think counting would be easy, but the complexities of the real world get in the way. The simplest way to count sessions is to simply count how many times we’ve taught the Fledge curriculum with a cohort of entrepreneurs. But if we do that, we have to include the dozens of part-time Kick...
Malawi may be the second poorest country in the world, but the people are happy, the country is safe, traffic is reasonable, and opportunities abound. Below are three videos from a week on the ground visiting Ziweto, Ecobuild, and some other local entrepreneurs. Ziweto Agrovet shop in Lilongwe (30 seconds) Ecobuild’s prototype brickyard A day visiting a mushroom farm, a diversified...
“We are very thrilled to anounce our strategic partnership with Lenovo which will enable us to have a Latam presence once we start selling our services “ said Geraldine Guzmán cofounder of Feelsgood. The company received seed capital from a strategic investor in Brazil and launched of its first VR health related product to the health professional community in Lima, Peru. At today’s event...
BURN designs, manufactures and distributes super fuel-efficient cooking products that save lives and forests in the developing world. BURN has revolutionized the global cookstove sector by proving the business case for selling high-quality, locally manufactured and unsubsidized cookstoves. Since 2013, BURN has sold more than 425,000 cookstoves in sub-Saharan Africa, which have helped two...
Eight new fledglings have started The Nature Accelerator, powered by Fledge at the University of Padova in Italy. Central Park Bees Limited partners with smallholder farmers and beekeepers to strengthen their income through sustainable beekeeping by giving them access to free beekeeping training, equipment loans, extension services and guaranteed markets that offer competitive prices for...
Africa Business Radio is headed to Harvard.
Founder Soji Akinlabi has been invited to be a
Neiman Journalism Fellow for the upcoming school year
If you are based in or around Boston,
and would like to help create “The Bloomberg of Africa”
please contact us and we’ll connect you to Soji.
Diloo delivers just about anything to anyone in Lima, Peru with a smartphone. In that growing city of 10+ million, with a fast-growing middle-class, and traffic like you can’t imagine, deliveries are a popular service. Over the past year, Diloo’s usage has grown 707%, and to keep up with that growth, the company has just closed a $400,000 investment round. Co-founder/CEO Jose ignacio...
Normally its the fledglings that fly to visit Fledge. This month Fledge’s founder, Luni, was passing through New Delhi, India and had a chance to stop by We-Convert, meet the team, get an update, and share a meal.
The unspoken joke was that back in the States, we call this “Indian food”. In New Delhi, it’s of course just “food”. Either way, it was delicious.
Back in 2016, Bill Gates said that if he were a poor person living in a developing country, he’d grow chickens. Chickens can feed your family and chickens can make you a lot of money. Perhaps that hypothetical Poor Bill would figure out how to pay for the chicks, the feed, and the vaccines to grow those chickens. Poor Bill might even be savvy enough to find a buyer for his first 500...