A Hand Up To A Rural Small Business.
Kids Comp Camp mission is to help Africa’s under-served communities, both children and adults around them, learn and embrace technology to transform their lives and communities.
Since inception in 2014, we’ve been keen to spend more and more time with our 8,000+ beneficiaries in 10+ rural communities across East Africa to learn of their pressing and complex problems and try to define broad opportunities we can help them address the challenges, of course with a bias of using education technology. Over the past 4 years, we’ve noted with concern that 40% of parents whose kids have attended a Kids Comp Camp run a small business. This is in a context where
90% of rural small businesses in Kenya close before turning 5. It is estimated about 1.2 Million have closed in the last 5 years. It is an extreme sport to run a small business here.
Small business make a significant part of our rural communities and therefore their failure is a felt pain point, negatively impacting families and the local community at large. To continually convince our rural communities value of technology we strive to empower them with skills and opportunities they can use to solve their pressing pain points by using technology. This year, we take up a challenge to help small businesses in rural Kenya, in communities we work with, to leverage on technology to grow and thrive in increasingly digital economy. In the next 10 years it is estimated 60% of new internet users will be in rural areas YET less than 20% of rural small businesses are online or do business digitally!
Because when a rural small business thrives, local communities also thrives and are better placed to support their Kids learn and embrace technology and this makes our ultimate joy and fulfills our goal.
We BELIEVE we can help small businesses in rural communities leverage on Internet and Smartphone penetration to grow. To VERIFY this we’re engaging 25 rural small businesses on challenges they face while trying to use technology to grow. We will recruit and train 25 brilliant and needy out of school youth on to work and help these businesses address these gaps. And MEASURE the growth of each small business as a result of engaging a trained community youth. We will be RIGHT if 60% of small business record 30% growth in the first quarter of engagement.
More interesting for us we’ll use the trained youth to support Kids Comp Camp efforts in their community.
Young people make the greatest resource we have in our rural communities, yet they are the most underutilized. For instance, of the more than 660,000 youth who’ve just graduated from High School last year (2018) 70% live in rural Kenya and less than 15% qualified to join university. The rate of idleness and joblessness is alarming. We want to mobilize and attract top talent, most brilliant and yet needy youth in our rural communities to help us transform small business and the local community at large.
To achieve this, we seek to raise 25 scholarships each at $50 to support 25 high potential rural youth. Your $50 scholarship will enable us to provide a device, connection, top notch training and stipend to a rural youth.
The big picture is to provide these young people with high quality tech and design skills and introduce them to the local gig economy eg create a small website, design a flyer, create a short video promo, manage social media campaign etc and start earning some income through working with/for local businesses to create content and connections the business needs to grow online and do business more digitally leveraging on the growing internet and smartphone penetration in rural Kenya. To sustain and scale, we’re creating a support system to connect trained youth to work with/for small business.
So, if you can please help us to give a hand up to these brilliant and able young people to give a hand up to a small business and transform their communities. You can offer your support here or via M-Pesa details on the poster below. Thank you so much for your time.
