Annabel from SE Forum recently spent three weeks visiting our alumni in India, Vietnam and Uganda! Having the privilege of being hosted by three social entrepreneurs from the SE Outreach Accelerator 2015 provided a great opportunity for us to gain a more in-depth understanding of their day-to-day operations and how SE Forum, as an organisation, can tailor our programmes to best suit their needs.

Let’s take a look!

First stop was India, where we visited Elsa Dsilva, co-founder of Safecity and Neelam Pol, founder of Khel Planet. Elsa and her team have collected over 9300 reports of sexual harassment on their online platform and run programs for young girls, in schools and with large corporations. When Elsa was in Stockholm last year she had a team of 3. Today the Safecity team consists of 8 employees and over 100 volunteers. Neelam is developing a new game for Khel Planet and is about to launch an online platform with non-academic games teaching life-skills to kids. The online site targets urban parents and is currently being tested by a group of users.

This photo is from one of Safecity’s workshops in Delhi. These girls are drawing a map of their neighbourhood and marking the places where they feel unsafe. This will later be used as a base when they brainstorm solutions of how to make the area safer.

Next stop was Vietnam, where we met up with Loan Nguyen from Bloom Microventures. Bloom Microventures combines responsible tourism and microfinance to alleviate poverty, by offering tourists an authentic insight into rural Vietnam and using the revenues to provide low-interest microloans to help women start their own businesses. Today Loan and her team have provided loans to around 200 women in the Hoa Binh province, helping them purchase farm animals, crops and fruit trees to scale up their production and create a sustainable income.

We visited one family who used their first loan to purchase more fruit trees to expand their orchard. They make their profit from selling the fruit at the local market and have now paid off the first loan and applied for a second one to plant more trees and increase their production.

The third and final stop was in Soroti, Uganda, where we visited Betty Ikalany, founder of Appropriate Energy Saving Technologies (AEST). AEST produces cookstoves and smoke-free briquettes made from groundnut husks – a common waste product in Soroti. When Betty was in Stockholm she sold 75 cookstoves/month – today she sells 400-500/month! AEST has also trained 55 entrepreneurs (mainly women) who sell the products in 4 districts in Uganda. Stella (holding the cookstove in the photo) is one of them. She uses the commission from her sales to develop her business and increase the product range in her shop.

After the briquettes have been moulded by a machine they dry in the sun for two days. These briquettes burn longer than regular charcoal and are smoke-free, which saves the customers both time and money while also protecting them from respiratory problems caused by cooking with firewood.

Follow us on Instagram @seforum to see more photos from this trip!