United Social Ventures

Who we are

United Social Ventures (UK Charity No. 1158935; Ugandan NGO No. 4936) coaches innovative young Ugandan social entrepreneurs from the very start of their journeys to create impactful and scalable startups. 

We believe that social ventures are the best level for young changemakers to lead change. Why?

1. Equitable - Anyone can create one - you don't need wealth/privilege, just ingenuity.
2. Impact - They prioritise impact over profits & are centered on their users.
3. Sustainability - Their market-based nature - continuously selling the same product - give them a permanence.
4.  Scalability - They are designed to solve systemic challenges for all.

While Uganda tops the charts as the most entrepreneurial country in the world - almost 30% of young people are engaged in the early stages of setting up and running an enterprise - the majority of these startups never fulfill their potential. 21% go out of business every year and only 2% expect to employ 20+ people in the next five years (GEM, 2015). There's a national "missing middle" of MSMEs valued at $4.87 billion and globally in lower income countries this gap is $5.2 trillion (IFC, 2017).

We believe this 'Pioneer Gap' is largely caused by a vicious circle: Entrepreneurs progress slowly, lacking a framework to get started, so the vast majority never reach a stage where they are attractive to funders (and their friends and family don't have the ability to help to this stage), therefore entrepreneurs observe their chances of success are low and never fully commit to their ideas - however innovative - and so progress is even slower.

Activities

United Social Ventures is trying to build a bridge for early-stage social entrepreneurs across the Pioneer Gap - from start to growth - through three approaches:

• Curriculum
• Coaching
• Community

Curriculum - we've create a framework of over 100 bite-sized projects to help start-ups with the tools they need to (a) generate innovative ideas, (b) go-to-market, and (c) develop a strategy for growth. These are also introduced to entrepreneurs through over 34 different workshop/webinar modules. Ultimately, this learning-by-doing framework makes their initiatives more effective, sustainable, and scalable.

Coaching - we meet all our 'Venture Members' once a year to judge their progress on our bridge and then recommend which of the bite-sized projects we can help them with. For 'Venture Fellows' we offer 100 hours of coaching to build growth strategies and fill gaps in their teams' expertise.

Community - We run series of workshops through partnerships with other ecosystem actors (e.g. innovation hubs, universities, and other development partners) who subsidise participants. Some workshop modules are build in collaboration with other institutions who bring particular expertise. And, ventures are introduced to a community of funders to help them access funds, commensurate to their progress.

United Social Ventures was founded in 2013 by recent graduates of Oxford and Makerere universities. We current have over 150 Venture Members who collectively have raised over $600,000 in the previous 2 years. In 89 surveys in 2020, all would recommend USV's service to others. Ventures have won awards such as the Anzisha Prize for Agriculture, the Global Cisco Innovation Competition, the Africa Prize for Engineering, YouthActionNet Global Fellowships, and more. We’ve hosted dozens of international volunteers in Uganda and 22 Ugandan students on exchanges to the UK.

Young people like our solution because no other institution is able to invest such quality time into their technical and emotional development as agents of change at such an early stage of their journeys as social entrepreneurs. The experiential learning with us is unlike anything they experience at higher education institutions.

Our vision is to expand our work in Uganda to reach hundreds of ventures per year with a self-sustaining office through payments from partners, successful ventures, hosting fees of international volunteers, and CSR. We would then like to expand to other countries, as we believe our work is replicable and required, particularly in other low-income economies.