Success with community-based small businesses in Tanzania has led us to design a new way of promoting and expanding such businesses. If our objectives can be fully realized, we should be able to reduce or eliminate the need for donations in the communities where we are pursuing this effort, and we hope to expand to many more communities. However, in the near term our program will rely on donations to cover the cost of planning and evaluating proposed businesses, and we are appealing to venture philanthropists, social investors, corporations, foundations and individuals to help in this effort (although WILMA does not accept tax subsidies from the US Government).

We have embarked upon a program to combat poverty and improve living standards in some of Africa's poorest communities through the formation of businesses structured as joint ventures. These businesses will be partly owned by African nonprofit organizations, which will provide the land, the initial planning, the labor, and services to the local community such as health and education. Commercial firms from industrialized countries will also be part owners, and they will provide the business expertise, technology, and capital to make each joint venture a success. To increase efficiency and sustainability, our business model clusters small business start-ups to take advantage of technical linkages, supply-demand relationships, and common land-use needs. The result is the Joint Venture Commercial Estate (JVCE), a community center for business and social services that relies on its own profits for sustainability.

You may download a color brochure that describes the JVCEs we are currently building and the businesses that form the core of their activities: WILMA Brochure 2007 (PDF, 1.8Mb).

WILMA's experience with the nurturing of community-based business growth in rural areas has demonstrated the basic need for an initiative to educate Entrepreneurial Leaders of Development (whom we call ELDers). ELDers need an appropriate experiential education to maximize their chances of success, with its many hazards and hurdles. Beyond formal studies, ELDers need opportunities as apprentices, interns, and mentored novices to apply their knowledge in practical applications. The ELDer Project, described in The ELDer Project in Africa (PDF, 283kb), is designed to provide these opportunities.

The ELDer Project is proposing an all-Africa Conference around the end of 2011 that will bring together African research with diverse experts to assess the past progress and future possibilities in the field of private community-based development through social entrepreneurship. Alongside research for the Conference, a two-year course of study called the Graduate Program in Social Entrepreneurship (GPSE) is being prepared. The GPSE will be set to use the Conference outputs as study materials, along with locally-gathered experience. The GPSE is designed to prepare outstanding graduates of secondary schools for careers in the various forms of this development, including Joint Venture Commercial Estates. Links between the education of ELDers and WILMA's work for business growth in marginalized communities are described in The Entrepreneurial Leadership of Development (PDF, 671kb).