Supporting our Scholars and Alumni beyond the Enterprise Challenge
An update on our seed fund recipients
The Enterprise Challenge, as part of our Leadership Programme has provided extra tools and knowledge to empower each cohort to think outside their academic disciplines. By providing workshops, mentorship and business expertise, our scholars have been encouraged to work up their own business enterprise ideas to learn essential problem-solving skills and transferable business knowledge.
Weidenfeld-Hoffmann Scholar, Tafadzwa Matika and team, with their Enterprise Challenge start-up Hande, were finalists in the Santander X Entrepreneurship Awards in October 2021
For the second year running, we were delighted to award Seed Fund grants for the scholars to start their enterprises. The WHT Enterprise Challenge Seed Fund enables scholars to make an impact through ventures that they create during their time in Oxford. We are very pleased to see these ideas finding their feet in the real world and hopes to support them further.
We are happy to share the enterprises from the 2020/21 cohort that received the grants to take their ideas further.
SmartZero by Tamarie Rocke from Belize
SmartZero is a soap refill service that sells soaps and cleaning liquids around villages in rural Belize. People living in rural Belize have a hard time getting household essentials and must purchase them more frequently, at a higher cost - this means lots of plastic rubbish! This idea is the culmination of Tamarie’s two years of personal transition to a zero-waste lifestyle, coupled with her passion for rural community outreach.
Arcua by Melissa Penagos Gaviria and Maria Mercedes Kuri from Colombia
Arcua offers a unique way for companies and individuals to offset the carbon emissions they generate by supporting communities that protect the forest in Colombia. The project helps rural farmers to convert their land to native forest and start receiving revenue from them. Arcua will help to develop the projects, certify them, and sell the credits to investors.
Nutriendo El Futuro by Samuel A. Diaz from Venezuela
Nutriendo El Futuro contributes to the community of Calvario Alto (Municipality of El Hatillo) by creating a community kitchen and, consequently, creating a non-profit Civil Association, which contributes to its empowerment, through training and education activities, and the recovery of community spaces.
Hande by Taf Matika from Zimbabwe
Hande is a last-mile delivery service, courier and e-commerce platform that helps small to medium enterprises to connect with their customers as quickly and conveniently as possible. Zimbabwe has tens of thousands of SMEs. The vast majority of these cannot make deliveries, so Hande offers these businesses an online marketplace and on-demand delivery services to comfortably reach more customers and grow their reach. Since graduation, the team of Hande were finalists at the Santander X Entrepreneurship Awards and recently have been selected as a top 10 UK start up, for the UK Accelerate (post revenue) category.
Tafadzwa (Left), with his team, getting ready to pitch their enterprise start-up Hande as finalists at the Santander X Entrepreneurship Awards
We wish all the enterprise team seed fund recipients’ good luck on their growth journeys.
We continue to follow the progress of our alumni in using the seed funding received to build on the concepts developed through the Enterprise Challenge. We are excited to share some updates from projects that received seed funding support from WHT a year later.
Francisco Obando from Ecuador has developed an MVP for his project Enotis, a web-based tool for “community”-level mass prioritization and decision making. He is securing partnerships with the University of Oxford to run the first pilot.
The power team behind “Hace la fuerza” project has managed to build the online platform, conduct a series of webinars and secure strategic partnerships for scaling up. The goal is to create a community of women professionals from Latin America that provide mentoring opportunities and career advice.
Andrea Terminel from Mexico is starting her ‘Help Beyond’ project. She is offering a platform that connects care and domestic service workers (nannies, cooks, cleaners, and people caring for the elderly) to formal job opportunities. She has just launched the website https://b-home.webflow.io/
We are very excited to see so the progress in the ventures supported by the seed funding, our team, including alumni and the Enterprise Challenge. We expect this will embolden our current scholars that their dreams, with teamwork, can become a reality.