Starting a Social Enterprise: How Technical Assistance Helped Me Reach My Goals

When I was 16 years old, I saw how difficult gardening could be in South Africa and set out to change it. I wanted to give people, regardless of their experience or education level, joy in growing their own food and protect the quarter of South Africans who go hungry every day. So I developed a paper seed strip technology that allows aspiring gardeners to plant seeds at the correct spacing and depth to reduce water usage and increase germination rates.

The product has been wildly successful, but it has not been easy moving a new agriculture technology from idea to proof of concept to scale in an emerging market that ag-tech investors have found too risky.

As the Reel Gardening concept began to gain traction, I needed a small business loan to purchase equipment, hire more staff and grow the company. However, it required onerous interest that nearly crippled the business and, more importantly, pulled my emphasis away from social impact. I stood at an impasse: How could Reel Gardening stay true to its foundational goals to make gardening accessible for all income levels and stay afloat?

I had conversations with corporations, governments and NGOs to find ways for us to partner, but no one would take the leap. I searched high and low for investors willing to take a risk on a new agricultural technology that wasn’t geared toward large-scale farmers, but instead for everyday people – some with limited incomes – and no one would come on board.

In 2013, Reel Gardening discovered Securing Water for Food (SWFF), a Grand Challenge for Development partnership between the United State Agency for International Development (USAID), Sweden (through the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, or Sida), the government of South Africa, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. SWFF works to fund and accelerate technology-based solutions that enable more food to be produced with less water in developing countries. Such solutions are few and far between in my experience. We applied for funding that year and won, a move I now see as pivotal for our company.

With $1.5 M in funding from SWFF, I was able to scale Reel Gardening when few others were interested in investing in us. Not only did SWFF address our funding gap, it provided the technical assistance we needed to grow our business in an emerging market. This is important for people like me who, while they have a great idea, do not have a formal background in business development and entrepreneurship.

SWFF helped us with the results-driven business development, commercial growth and scaling we needed to move forward. They pushed us to establish gardens in schools, which became a great marketing asset for us within several communities. With this increased exposure, Reel Gardening leveraged better relationships with local agents and trainers to represent the company and expand revenue, all while making a difference in those communities.

Now, SWFF is helping us enter the mainstream retail market, incorporating a Buy One, Give One (BOGO) concept. This will help us leverage the profits from commercial sales to subsidize our work with schools and the poor. Through a technical support vendor, SWFF is helping us assess our business model to identify our strengths and weaknesses, and performing a feasibility analysis of the BOGO model. Our goal is a commercially viable, high-quality product. As part of this analysis, the vendor is taking a critical look at the company’s customer segmentation and its pricing model. In addition to a recommendation to proceed with the model, it is also creating a business plan and a financial model for us. This will serve as our strategic blueprint for the next five years.

And the impact, you ask? Reel Gardening has enabled 470,433 people to grow their own food, saving more than 34 million liters of water and produced 1,200 tons of produce on 47 hectares of land. We  have expanded beyond South Africa’s borders and are looking to expand in the U.K. and the U.S., and potentially Dubai and Japan. After two and a half years of SWFF support, Reel Gardening has generated over $580,000 in sales and partnerships. We trained more than 800 women and 1,500 children in organic farming, which has led our alums to found 16 independent microenterprises.

What I learned as a social entrepreneur was never to give up. SWFF helped us close our funding gap and helped us learn the skills we needed to make our impact dreams a reality.

This blog is a part of the June 2017 series on advisory support for inclusive businesses in partnership with USAID and the African Agricultural Fund’s Technical Assistance Facility, both of which deliver advisory support and have new analysis of it just launched (AAF’s TAF) and forthcoming (USAID).

Read the full series for more lessons from seven different providers of advisory support and stories of success from entrepreneurs.

Claire Reid is the CEO and founder of Reel Gardening in South Africa.
Photo courtesy of Reel Gardening.

A similar version of this article was originally published by Next Billion.