“Empowering Greatness in Unlikely Places” with The Somo Project

Introducing UW Blueprint’s first project

UW Blueprint
UW Blueprint
2 min readOct 16, 2016

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The Somo Project is a nonprofit organization working to provide local entrepreneurs living in Kenya with the business resources, mentorship and grants they need to stimulate business in their communities.

Somo helps the entrepreneurs succeed by creating sustainable business strategies, offering an MBA boot camp, and providing them with the necessary mentorship to get their businesses up and running. As a result, the entrepreneurs return to their hometowns empowered with the confidence they need to grow their business, and equipped with the necessary training and knowledge provided by Somo.

What they need

One of the challenges Somo faces is getting in contact with the entrepreneurs once they are back in their home towns. Many of them don’t have internet access, which cuts out most of today’s modern communication options. However, Somo would greatly benefit from being able to send their entrepreneurs surveys to collect feedback on how their businesses are doing and how they could be of more help.

To address this challenge, a team of 9 students from UW Blueprint are building a software platform where Somo can create surveys and send them to their entrepreneurs via SMS. The entrepreneurs can then text message back with their responses. These responses are recorded and displayed back to the company for analysis.

This can streamline Somo’s operations, improve their business programs and help Somo to fulfill its mission of empowering greatness in unlikely places.

Katrina Crisostomo

Stay tuned for updates!

Check out our website and Facebook page for more

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UW Blueprint
UW Blueprint

Tech for non-profits, built by UWaterloo students