KadAfrica: Empowering Out of School Girls through Passion Fruit
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Founding Story
Team
Eric
Kaduru
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, KYE, Kyenjojo
, KYE, Kyenjojo
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KadAfrica is a 2014 SEED Africa Award Winner and Eric is a proud 2014 Unreasonable Fellow. KadAfrica was named as a 2013 Young Achievers Africa Award Winner in the Agriculture and Agro-Processing Category, awarding young Ugandans for best practices and excellence and youth creativity. It was also awarded the in the Agriculture Category at the 2013 Pakasa Youth Forum. KadAfrica was a 2013 Semifinalist for the Unilever Sustainable Living Young Entrepreneurs Award and first runner up in the 2013 Global Social Venture Competition in the Europe, Middle East, and Africa region.
KadAfrica operates through a public private partnership with Catholic Relief Services and Caritas. These partnerships allow KadAfrica to source land rent-free for out of school girls through an innovative post-paid/in-kind rental plan with the Catholic Church, while providing curriculum based trainings for program participants. Caritas acts as the link between Catholic Relief Services, KadAfrica, and the Catholic Church, helping to secure contracts with parish priests. Caritas also aids in the mobilization of the community and helps to manage 12 field facilitators who work with the girls daily and are trained as Agriculture Extension Workers by KadAfrica. Catholic Relief Services provides gender empowerment, financial literacy, and entrepreneurship training to the girls. Through its network of farmers savings groups in Western Uganda, it also helps the girls organize savings and pool resources for the success of their agri-businesses.
KadAfrica has grown at an incredible rate since getting its seed investment in November 2012, and embarking on our out grower model in May 2013. With 1500 farmers in our network, and a wait list of more than 2000 KadAfrica is currently understaffed to continue our current growth trajectory while providing the same high quality, hands on technical agriculture support that has been key to the girls' success. KadAfrica plans to add an additional 18 trained field facilitators to our staff to support our young entrepreneurs, and help to increase the efficiency of on-site packing, payment, and pick up of all out grower passion fruit for urban wholesale. Currently, we are in the final due-diligence round of a "Bridge" investment round that will make this internal growth possible.
KadAfrica equips young out of school girls with the resources and skills necessary to become independent, economic drivers of their communities by engaging in agriculture entrepreneurship. Out of school girls constitute a large segment of Uganda’s most vulnerable youth with only 42 percent of girls finishing primary school and only 33% of those continuing their education to 18 years of age. Dropping out of school has serious implications for girls’ social and physical well-being, making this group particularly vulnerable. Girls in rural areas face greater obstacles to completing higher levels of education and are left with few economic and life options once they have left school. Early marriage and pregnancy tend to follow school drop-out which greatly affects their ability to improve their financial situation. By creating viable agro-enterprise ventures cultivating passion fruit, KadAfrica is building strong cooperatives of women, able to meaningfully engage with their local economies through self employment and participation in the agriculture sector. Girls' newly acquired business acumen has allowed them to expand their agro-enterprise on other locally available land, often deciding to pool resources. This job security for rural young women is further complimented through creating wider social cohesion for rural communities, who are able to learn from the girls and replicate their agricultural successes with passion fruit farming.
13-17.
Entrepreneurship, Training/Skill Development, Rural Economies.
Girls/Women.
1,001 to 10,000
10-100
Fewer than 10
Unlock Nurturing Environments: help young people work together to cultivate opportunities and wellness throughout the earth and its communities