PACE – Intellecap Partnership

Over the past 15 years, Intellecap has built and refined an ecosystem-based approach to accelerating entrepreneurship and innovation among Small & Growing Businesses (SGBs) in India. We have built services, tools, products, and methodologies to unlock support for SGBs from several private commercial and donor organizations. USAID through the Partnering to Accelerate Entrepreneurship (PACE) initiative, partnered with Intellecap to replicate its ecosystem-based approach for accelerating the entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystem in East Africa. This partnership was co-supported by the Shell Foundation and Argidius Foundation. Support to Intellecap under PACE began in October 2015.

Intellecap has sought to replicate its ecosystem-based approach to East Africa by bringing together capital, knowledge and networks to support SGBs at two levels: (i) provide direct support to SGBs in the form of acceleration, fund-raising, technical assistance, innovation transfer, and market linkages, and (ii) discover and engage critical ecosystem players such as corporations (both local and international), accelerators, other development sector players in supporting SGBs.

This report seeks to provide a summary of the results and also highlights the key learnings from our replication effort. It includes:

• Overview of progress made by Intellecap’s different products and services as well as Intellecap Africa as an organizational unit
• Detailed progress report on each of the three key pillars of our ecosystem-based approach:
  1. Networks, which include Sankalp Forum and our angel network (I3N)
  2. Knowledge services, which include consulting and our proprietary platforms
  3. Capital, through our nascent equity capital fund
• Discussion on key challenges, lessons learnt and proposed adaptations in our approach