Kenyan start-up MESH, the country’s
first online community for young entrepreneurs in the informal economy, has
announced it has reached 150,000 members.
Launched to the mass market in November
2021, MESH connects young entrepreneurs and small business owners to vital
networks, tailored training content, and for the first time, access to
opportunities and services in the formal economy. This new growth milestone
follows a one-year partnership with Mastercard Strive Community, a
philanthropic program of the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth and Caribou
Digital, which provided early-stage grant funding and technical support to
develop and scale MESH.
With additional early-stage
investment from Shujaaz Inc and
funding from TRANSFORM, MESH was founded with a mission to unlock the potential
of the informal economy in Kenya, which, it’s estimated,
is where 41% of the country’s GDP is generated. New research also
shows that 95% of young Kenyans work in the country’s informal sector,
with 15-24-year-olds adding USD 520 million to the Kenyan economy every month.
But young entrepreneurs in the
informal sector face significant barriers to growth. Often loans, services, and
work opportunities in the formal economy are out of reach, their networks are
limited to family and friends, and they don’t have access to the relevant tools
and training they need to start up and scale up their businesses. Meanwhile,
major corporations – from multinational fast-moving consumer goods companies
(FMCGs) to telecommunications providers and financial institutions – say they
are struggling to reach this sizeable consumer market and tap into the
potential of these entrepreneurs.
With the backing of its early-stage
supporters, including Mastercard Strive Community, MESH is changing things by
challenging traditional conceptions around employment and redefining what the
future of work looks like in economies like Kenya’s.
Anuj
Tanna, Co-Founder and CEO of MESH, commented: “The
early stage grant funding and support of Strive Community has been instrumental
in enabling us to build, start-up, and scale MESH. We’re so proud that MESH is
now connecting 150,000 young entrepreneurs to each other – and for the first
time, to valuable gig work and training opportunities with our growing
community of commercial partners. In particular, the partnership with Strive
Community has been instrumental in helping us to refine, test, and scale our innovative
learning models that are enabling thousands of small business owners to build
the real-world skills they need to thrive.”
The funding from Mastercard’s Strive
Community has supported MESH in testing, designing, and scaling its innovative
training model, enabling young people to learn in bite-sized, peer-led,
digital-first formats – in their own language and on their own terms. The
skills programs available through the platform are also enabling MESHers to
build their own digital ID and directly unlock new valuable work and service
opportunities with MESH’s commercial partners.
Natasha
Jamal, Vice President of Social Impact, Strive, Mastercard Center for Inclusive
Growth, said: “Facilitating access to networks for
entrepreneurs is core to the work of Strive Community; the early success of our
collaboration with MESH highlights the impact we can have when we combine this
access to resources with the transformative power of digital technology. The
milestone MESH has achieved in reaching 150,000 entrepreneurs in Kenya is proof
positive that we can bring life to economies across the globe by empowering
small business owners with digital solutions that not only meet their needs but help them make progress toward their biggest goals.”