Vodafone, one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies is advancing social change at a global scale by supporting partners using technology to resolve shared problems, improve lives and transform entire communities.
We are thrilled to announce that the Vodafone Americas Foundation has endorsed our approach to socioeconomic change through entrepreneurship for all with our first multi-year grant.
Centro originally applied for the Vodafone Wireless Innovation Project competition in February 2016, and while our application was not selected, they felt we might be more suitable for their partnership programs so we were invited to meet and discuss possible grant opportunities. We want to give special thanks to June Sugiyama, Director of Vodafone Americas Foundation for inviting us to introduce our organization firsthand and providing the grant to help us continue our mobile development work supporting small business entrepreneurs.
Centro will use the $100,000 grant for programming focused on supporting the growth of low-to-moderate income youth, women and minority owned micro enterprises, and the development and engineering of our Business Planning App, which is the foundation of our Basic Entrepreneurship Education Suite. More specifically, we will use the funds to:
Facilitate access to capital: We will design functionality that will help entrepreneurs understand their capital needs, improve their credit, create robust business plans and increase savings to successfully access micro-loans.
Improve data collection: We will develop features within the app to capture valuable data points such as age, gender, location, income level and education that will help us learn more about our app users. In order to further improve the effectiveness of the app and provide impact details to partners and funders, we also plan to start measuring data in the following areas: demographics, economics, social, psychological, general e-learning.
Develop new mobile app activities: We are engineering new app activities that will be added to our Business Planning Tool including financial projections and marketing.
We’re excited to count Vodafone Americas Foundation among our list of stewards. We are deeply grateful for their support of our vision, and the next steps they will enable us to take in the years to come.