Innovative Workshop for Social Enterprises 

The Fletcher School celebrates its tradition of social innovation, from the D-Prize to the work of its alumni. 

Four Fletcher students traveled to Schmoozefest in Tarrytown, N.Y. in October, where they met with entrepreneurs and potential funders for their various social enterprises. The conference provided them all with rich insight on bringing their enterprises to fruition. 

Refining a Winning Concept

Since winning the Fletcher D-Prize last spring, Maggie Adomako FG28, Richard Geegbae F25 and Gabriel Waithaka F24 have begun operations on the ground in Kilifi County for their social enterprise, Ongeza Zao na Pato (OZP). 

The project takes a multipronged approach to community empowerment. OZP introduces researched pulse varieties and climate-smart farming techniques to smallholder farmers and taps into women and young people’s social networks to reach their target audience. 

Waithaka, who graduated from the MAHA program last spring, is leading operations in Kenya, and Adomako and Geegbae attended the Schmoozefest to meet donors and fine-tune their concept. 

“Speaking with donors was very enlightening,” said Adomako. “Their questions got us thinking: ‘How do you intend to scale up? How do you intend to evaluate the program?’”

Geegbae and Adomako spoke with potential donors about the project’s pilot, and these conversations caused them to assess their baseline survey and how they’ll evaluate the program’s success, changes that they’ve begun to implement with Waithaka.

In a recent meeting with OZP’s youth partners, they realized that the dialogue from the Schmoozefest was inspiring new ideas. 

“I realized I was actually thinking about the conversation with those Schmoozefest funders,” said Adomako. “We came back, modified our baseline survey and now it's helping us with the end of pilot evaluation.”

Empowering Delhi’s ‘Street Children’ 

While Schmoozefest provided the OZP team with a chance to pivot in implementing their social enterprise, it gave MA student Surabhi Malhotra F25 the inspiration to ideate hers. 

Malhotra came to Fletcher from Delhi, India, bringing with her several years of grassroots experience working in early childhood education, child rights and youth leadership. At Fletcher, she studies sustainable development and human rights with a particular focus on children. These interests are beginning to coalesce in her new nascent venture supporting Delhi’s children in “street situations.”

“Delhi has over 70,000 children who live on and off the streets,” said Malhotra. “They might or might not have families or might have some temporary shelter, but mostly throughout the day, they are on the streets trying to earn a livelihood.”

Malhotra is seeking ways to empower these children. Professor Alnoor Ebrahim connected her with the Schmoozefest, where she first pitched the idea. 

“I didn't even have a name for the organization,” she said. “Schmoozefest was a great place for me to think about getting serious about this, what the pitch could look like and how I can explain this to people.” 

Her experience discussing the concept with potential donors and the OZP team who won the D-Prize last year has helped her begin to concretize her ideas. She returned to campus with momentum for this capstone project and the beginnings of her own D-Prize pitch. 

Malhotra now calls the venture she is ideating “Project Better Bachpan,” which translates to “Project Better Childhood,” aiming to provide a better childhood for children in street situations in Delhi.

University Admission for African Students

Edward Okyere-Darko F25 was inspired to found EnrollaVista following his own experience seeking undergraduate admission at American universities. He saw that the existing systems to help high school students earn admission to universities overseas were costly. EnrollaVista aims to guide prospective college students in Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa through providing consultations, application assistance and scholarship support as they seek admission to universities in the United States, Canada and Europe. 

“Professor Ebrahim’s Managing NGO Social Enterprise class was the first time I heard about social impact companies,” said Okyere-Darko. “Then I had the idea to convert this for-profit into a social impact company.”

For Edward Okyere-Darko, Schmoozefest helped him identify opportunities to improve his social enterprise. Schmoozefest caused Okyere-Darko to reimagine the enterprise’s fee model. 

“I met the managing director of Livelihood Impact, and we discussed EnrollaVista,” said Okyere-Darko. “He punched holes in it. I came back immediately and went to Professor Ebrahim’s office for debriefing and he encouraged me to write a business plan.” 

Schmoozing to Build Community 

The Fletcher cohort found additional benefits beyond meeting donors and workshopping pitches – Schmoozefest connected them with fellow Fletcher community members. They met with Fletcher alumni, who helped them practice their pitches over breakfast and offered candid feedback. 

“It was a great space for us to build relationships amongst ourselves,” said Malhotra. “The Schmoozefest hosted a group of people who come from different countries and at different stages of running their organizations. The people participating in Schmoozefest were open, innovative, kind and treated all as equal – irrespective of what stage their idea or venture was in.” 

Read more about Fletcher’s Strategic Management and Consulting for Global Impact field of study.