Day 3 of MIT Start-up Workshop

After yesterday's action-packed day, I was prepared for a relaxing Friday. Jessica Jackley Flannery shattered my hopes immediately and completely. She told another improbable story: how a few friends, making a few loans of a couple of dollars each, helping a few farmers in Uganda, grew within the space of a few years to kiva.org, an international community of 470,000 lenders providing US$ 65,000,000 in loans to 95,000 entrepreneurs. The recovery rate of these loans is an amazing 98% with interest rates about 10% below the norm for most micro-finance programs. Go to www.kiva.org to learn more and become a lender yourself.

What strikes me again and again listening to stories of Jessica and Alicia yesterday (pictured below), is how improbable they sound and how they rely more on character, grit and determination than on anything we can teach in an Entrepreneurship class.

What is especially heartening is that many of these very modern success stories are being told by women. In fact, a decade or so ago, a conference like this would have attracted very few women. Today, almost half of the participants were female. In fact, if you leave out the age groups north of 40, I would wager that women were in the majority. In entrepreneurship, the glass ceiling has not only shattered, it has disappeared completely!


And then there was William Kamkwamba from Malawi. His story is so unbelievable, all I'm going to provide you with is a link to YouTube: Moving Windmills. Who said there was no entrepreneurial spirit in Africa?


And so ends a magnificent three day event. There was a lot of networking going on. I'm especially pleased that South African organisations pitched up in great numbers. Richard Branson School of Entrepreneurship, Raizcorp, SEDA, DTI, Wits Business School, the City of Cape Town, the Bandwidth Barn, TSiBA of course, and just about anyone who is anyone in SA entrepreneurship was there.