CORICAP Impact First

Intervention

Social or environmental challenge

Despite being the fourth largest country in Africa in terms of population size, Congo-based startups and entrepreneurs received less than 0.01% of investor funds in 2022. By contrast, Nigeria, the most populated, received 25%, while Egypt (third) received 19%. Congo's external perception as highly corrupt, lacking rule of law and adequate skilled talent, is the principal reason for the discrepancy.
Civil war and ongoing instability that has plagued Congo for 25 years crippled every fragment of society. While San Francisco now has driverless taxis, 74% of people in Congo don’t have access to a bank (including mobile money services). Given Congo's rapidly growing population, these challenges demand the utmost urgency to prevent an avoidable humanitarian disaster. CORICAP will leverage the power of machine learning and big data to identify the most pressing needs, and initiate creative solutions to deploy innovative finance with the aim of maximizing social impact.

Description of the intervention

CORICAP intends to launch the first phase of creating an innovation hub in Congo that will leverage big data (cellphone usage data, satellite imagery, social media) to create startups and businesses that tackle the country’s most pressing needs. The aim of the innovation hub is to effectively allocate capital to ideas with the highest potential for social impact.
CORICAP's program will identify current existing startups in Congo, and create a database of the smartest and most skilled people interested in pursuing entrepreneurship. Phase one’s focus is to prove the existence of an investable cohort of talent and opportunities in Congo. For our startup cohort, CORICAP will coach participants by providing advisory support and expertise to strengthen the business models and improve operational efficiency. For the soon-to-be-entrepreneurs, CORICAP will: provide readiness training to familiarize members with realities of working in Congo, pair up individuals based on skills, and allocate societal challenges to be solved as identified by data and analytics.
Upon project completion, CORICAP will disseminate evidence globally of an investable database of promising startups, and paired skilled individuals solving complex problems that have plagued the Congolese society such as low financial inclusion rates or access to education.

Last data update

Data for this pipeline project was last updated in August 2023.