As we prepare for the holiday period, let’s have one last look at 2023, shall we? It’s been a rather good year, overall. Despite geopolitical challenges and conflict, all hubs continued to operate.. and some even thrived. We’ve featured many of our innovative young entrepreneurs in this news section, we’ve told you all about exciting events like the West Africa Deal Summit and SARA and shared regular updates about all that was going on in hubs across the network. Today, let’s look at the bigger picture. What was our overall impact in 2023? Our Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Queen Mariam Al-Bouawad reports.
In 2023…
- We launched 23 training cycles
- Some hubs doubled impact and even organised two cycles in 2023 (DRC, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Senegal, Morocco La Caravane, Palestinian Territories)
- Interest in Orange Corners remained high, with 8,000+ young change-makers applying to join one of our training programmes
- More than 1,000 young people were trained this year. That’s more than double the number of last year!
- And of course, we welcomed two hubs to the Orange Corners family: Jordan and Bangladesh
Overall impact
Till date, together we…
- Trained about 2,500 entrepreneurs
- Support some 4,500 jobs
- Our young entrepreneurs designed 4,500 new or improved products
In 2023, our hubs kept innovating with fresh ideas for programme implementation..
- The Super Cohort: In Ghana alone, 565 entrepreneurs participated in Orange Corners this year, a record number
- The Accessible Cohort: In DRC, a new hybrid form ensured that people from all over DRC could join
- The Trekking Cohort: In Morocco, La Caravane started its seventh cohort – touring across Morocco
When you invest in a woman, you invest in a community. So what about the gender gap?
It was a good year for female entrepreneurs as well: 49% of all our participants were women. That’s over 500 women supported!
Gender rates were highest in:
- Côte d’Ivoire, Cohort 7 – 75%
- South Africa, Cohort 7 – 70%
- Palestinian Territories, Cohort 2 – 67%
Building ecosystems
- Our hubs worked tirelessly to strengthen the entrepreneurial ecosystem. In 2023, they all organised:
- 27 networking events
- 75 workshops
- 78 master classes
- 89 community outreach events
That’s the equivalent of 9 months of non-stop activities!
Rating
- On average, Orange Corners alumni rate the programme a 8.3
We give our implementing partners a solid 10. Whether they stay on this journey with us or continue on another path, we thank them all for their hard work and wish them and all our other partners and friends a healthy and successful 2024!
