Students and start-ups in Africa learn from and with each other

Five young female start-up founders from Africa met 18 Master's students at the WFI in the summer semester of 2024 to work together on their sustainable business models and make their companies more efficient. The framework for this unusual learning format is provided by the "Social Innovation" seminar, an integral part of the curriculum of the "Entrepreneurship and Innovation" Master's degree program. The contact is Prof. Dr. André Habisch, Professor of Christian Social Ethics at the KU, and honorary Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Bayer Foundation and co-founder of SISTAC.

The founders from Africa had previously been awarded the "Women Empowerment Award" by the Bayer Foundation, which includes prize money and the opportunity for professional exchange. The aim of the award is to support female founders from the Global South in the successful realization of their social impact business ideas, whereby "social impact" stands for a special orientation of the business objectives towards the sustainability goals of the United Nations. The participating start-ups focus on the fundamental areas of nutrition and health: The “Iriba Water Group”, for example, has set itself the goal of improving access to clean drinking water in very low-income areas of Rwanda. "Zuri Health" aims to create easier access to health care in rural areas. A functioning business model is an important prerequisite for achieving these goals.

In the "Social Innovation" seminar at the WFI, the students therefore looked at the start-ups' business models and identified areas in which the models could still be improved. The cooperation with the business administration students is just one of many parts of the support provided as part of the "Women Empowerment Award", but a very valuable one, as Prof. Dr. André Habisch explains: "The students' work begins with analyzing the business models, but goes far beyond that. For points that they identify as needing improvement, they develop a minimum viable product, i.e. a prototype of their proposed solution, which they then test with the start-ups' real customer groups or suppliers." This procedure helps the students to optimize their proposed solutions before they present them to their start-up partners at the end.

Students and entrepreneurs got to know each other personally at the Social Innovation Bootcamp in Ingolstadt at the end of April 2024 – an important basis for the collaboration in the months that followed. "It was a personal match with the founders right from the start. We got on really well and the topic is very exciting because we can really make a social impact with it. With this project, we are helping farmers in Africa to avoid the problem of corruption in financing and to obtain bank loans more easily in order to finance their farms", explains KU student Florian Thoma.

Daisy Isiaho, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Zuri Health, is also delighted about the joint project launch at the KU:  "I am so excited to be here today in Ingolstadt in cooperation with Bayer Foundation, SISTAC and the students just to empower and share some of our perspectives, our journey as young women founders who have impactful solutions and working and running business in Africa." It's great to see everyone working together to share ideas, launch innovations and build a collaborative, sustainable future together.

André Habisch emphasizes that both sides benefit from exchange and cooperation: "The founders receive high-quality business advice from the students free of charge and can thus advance their business model. The students are motivated by the fact that they can make a real difference for the people in the target regions with the knowledge they have gained during their studies. They also learn about entrepreneurship at first hand and develop important skills such as problem solving, intercultural communication and project management." The "Social Innovation" seminar is therefore a prime example of solution-oriented bidirectional knowledge transfer: The practical knowledge of the project partners from Africa and the theoretical and practical knowledge acquired by the students at the KU flow together to solve social challenges.

The learning format, which was initially tested at the KU, has now reached other universities on different continents via SISTAC. Purdue University in Indiana, USA, will soon be offering a similar course, and the format is also being planned at Asia Pacific University in Malaysia. Partnerships with Santa Clara University in California and the University of Leeds in the UK are also being planned, as Dr. Eva Wack, Managing Director of SISTAC and former research associate at the WFI, reports: "Our wish is to get even more universities on board so that we can achieve even more together."