ZAO: Connect. Invest. Impact. August 2019 Newsletter

ZAO : Connect. Invest. Impact.
August 2019 Newsletter

Hello,
 
We are happy to introduce you to ZAO! 
ZAO is an impact investment platform for the African diaspora, committed to creating access to impactful and profitable projects ‘back home’.

General updates 

Our Pilot Investment in Western Kenya is impacting over 120 smallholder farmers and is progressing successfully with the first drawdown completed and assets purchased (more on this later!).
 
We're scaling up our downstream architecture—working with software developers to streamline our offline-to-online data capture and management to create further transparency and efficiency! Expect this to be rolled out by November 2019. 

 
Big Time Hire 
 
We closed Martin Kagocha as our Investments Manager in Kenya.
He will be leading on the Monitoring & Evaluation of our portfolio. 

Business development 

We continue to have a ton of momentum across important parts of our business model:
 
From July to August we grew our diaspora audience by 170%! We are looking to grow the ZAO community further, so we would be very grateful if you could please share, share, share this newsletter with your network! 
 
One big thing we are scaling up is our initial portfolio for our closed investor groups as we wait to complete our FCA authorization. We now have several companies impacting thousands of people that have approached us for partnership and funding.

Fund raising - Seed Funding 

We are in active fundraising mode. Our goal is to get seed funding secured by December 2019. We have been having some “sneak peek” conversations and we’re building significant traction. 
If there is someone that you think we should get in front of, please send us their details and we will connect with you about setting up an intro :)

Update on our pilot 

 
Thanks to the existing members of the ZAO community, we have been running our pilot for 4 months with Kesho Rural Ecofarm (KRE) and it has been nothing short of amazing!
KRE aims to give smallholder farmers access to improved agronomical practices, credit for agricultural inputs and diversify farmers’ productivity.

Our pilot is serving 124 small holder farmers across two sub-locations in Kakamega, Kenya. Of these farmers, 68% are women so we know we are helping not only individuals but households improve their productivity. Average monthly net income per farmer is currently KSH34,100 (£272), we are expecting the pilot to result in more than 30% increase in monthly net income. 
 

Who we are looking for 

This is an exciting time for us and our team is growing rapidly! 
 
We are looking for talented and creative problem-solvers to help us build an African-led impact investment culture. Please get in touch or refer a friend who has experience in Finance, Digital Marketing, and Software development across a number of disciplines of which User Experience, Full stack web, Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain.
 
Most importantly, we are determined to deliver on all our investment projects, so join our growing community of investors who already are making a difference through our closed rounds. We’d love to hear from you, reach out and learn how you too can get involved! Thank you for all the support and happy to answer any questions you might have.

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