Scale Up is an NGO created by three HEC business school and Telecom Paristech students. Our goal is to spend 1 year working with social entrepreneurs in Asia, Africa and South America. We will carry out between 6 and 8 missions to help entrepreneurs assess their impact on their beneficiaries and communicate the result.

Scale_up___v4_logo_isole__-1437561013

Social Entrepreneurs

Social entrepreneurs are individuals with innovative solutions to society’s most pressing social problems. They are ambitious and persistent, tackling major social issues and offering new ideas for wide-scale change.

Social entrepreneurs often seem to be possessed by their ideas, committing their lives to changing the direction of their field. They are visionaries, but also realists, and are ultimately concerned with the practical implementation of their vision above all else.

Social impact is the effect of the entrepreneur’s activity on the social fabric of the community and well-being of the individuals and households.

Our theme: scaling up social businesses

Scaleup-1437503347

Recent litterature on social entrepreneurship has pointed out that the greatest challenge of social entrepreneurs is to scale up their successful innovations once they have been validated in their local context or pilot stage to tackle issues at the societal level. We want to study this challenge from the entrepreneur’s perspective: understand their vision, their strategy and the hurdles to growing their social innovation beyond their own community.

To do so, we will meet and work with entrepreneur’s facing the challenge of scaling their business or their innovation to interview them and accompany them in their project.

Our mission: social impact measurement

Maximizing their social impact is a key objective for social entrepreneurs but they often lack the resources to conduct measurement studies (lack of training, lack of time, lack of financial resources).

We are trained in social impact measurement by French NGO Planète d’Entrepreneurs and by the French impact investing fund I&P and we work for the entrepreneurs as volunteers.

The aim of our missions is to help the entrepreneurs assess their impact, give them recommendations on how to increase it and help them communicate the results to potential investors and donors.

For each mission, we go to the field to meet and interview the stakeholders. We collect the data and analyse it to assess the impact of the project. We then create a reporting tool to present our analysis and recommendation. Finally we give the entrepreneur the tools to carry future assessments without our assistance.

Our missions so far

wPower by SSP - Maharashtra, India :

Swayam Shikshan Prayog (SSP) is a learning and development organization that brings women and communities from the margin to mainstream by building competencies, collaborative platforms and partnerships. SSP was awarded the 3 year wPOWER India program by USAID India. The wPower program globally aims to train more than 7,000 women entrepreneurs, helping them to sell new technologies like clean cook stoves and solar lanterns in India, Nigeria, and throughout East Africa.

Our missions will be to measure the impact of this program of the life and work of these women.

INSTEDD - Cambodia (negociation ongoing) :

INSTEDD develops open source technologies to help partners improve their collaboration and information sharing in bringing solutions and services to vulnerable populations.

Siatol - Burkina Faso :

Huile1-1437503708

Siatol transforms soy into soybean meal for the local poultry farming industry. To do so it trains local farmers to produce quality soy, helps them access the necessary inputs at credit and garantees them a buying price for a given quantity thereby helping the communities build a sustainable livelihood. Our mission will be to study Siatol’s impact on the producers and on the structuring of the soy and poultry industries in Burkina Faso.

Station Energy - Senegal :

Boutique-960x430-1437504219

Station Energy conceives and develops innovative systems and infrastructures for access to energy in Africa. In Senegal, Station Energy is currently developping affordable, solar powered cold storages for local farming and fishing communities to better manage their produce and generate more revenue.

Our mission will be to assess the impact of this new technology on their clients.

About the team :

Oliver_x180-1437338009

Oliver:

After a first experience in social business in Uganda and 6 months working for a consulting firm specialized in emerging markets in Africa and the Middle-East, Oliver wants to discover the innovative businesses of emerging markets before maybe launching his own venture.

Cyrielle_x180-1437337996

Cyrielle:

Having discovered social entrepreneurship at school, Cyrielle started learning more about it doing microfinance in Vietnam for a month. After working on the impact of video games on gamers at Ubisoft and on supporting the work of social entrepreneurs at Ashoka, she decided to mix up the two to help entrepreneurs measure and bring out their impact.

Lucas_x180-1437328068

Lucas:

During his years at HEC Lucas discovered social entrepreneurship and the potential it represents in developping countries. After one year at Telecom Paristech for his double-degree where he studied the new issues of digital economy he’s now going to meet those who generate social innovation.

Our destinations

Planète d’Entrepreneurs

Planète d’Entrepreneurs is a French NGO specialized in social impact measurement for innovative social entrepreneurs across the world. Since its foundation, the NGO sends teams each year for 1 year of field missions. Scale Up is one of the teams leaving this summer.

Our partners

Scale Up by PDE