This case explores the development of Projet Jeune Leader, a social entrepreneurship enterprise founded by Maia Ramarosandratana in 2013 to provide comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) to middle school children throughout Madagascar. Ramarosandratana had grown the organization to have fifty-six educators reaching over 29,490 adolescents. As she thought about the next plans for scaling the work, which included partnering with the Ministry of Education to help with technical assistance to institutionalize CSE within the department’s existing educational structures, what else needed to be considered? What were some of the lessons learned over the last nine years, and what other building blocks should she be thinking about?
<p align="justify">James Urdang, founder of Education Africa, registered the non-profit organization (NPO) in 1992. While the dismantling of apartheid laws and legacies began in the early 1990s, the systemic impact of centuries of oppression required more than just a change in political leadership. The education system, challenged by the historical injustices of apartheid (and its colonial precursors), had been deeply impacted. Urdang set up Education Africa with the objective of contributing positively to the goal of equitable and quality education and aligned with the United Nations (UN) sustainable development goal of quality education for all. One of Education Africa’s flagship programs was the South African Model UN (SAMUN).<br><br\>As an NPO, Education Africa relied on donor funding for its projects. A corruption scandal in 2010 left the organization severely financially compromised. While most of the NPO’s projects, such as the Early Childhood Development project, had sufficient funding to be sustainable, SAMUN had not been able to run since 2017 due to a lack of funding. The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in much of the organization’s funding coming to an end in 2020. The pandemic’s effect on global travel further exacerbated the sense that it would be difficult to reinstate SAMUN. How could Urdang source funding for SAMUN in the global pandemic context and financial constraints to ensure the long-term financial sustainability of Education Africa?<p/>
AWARD-WINNING CASE - African Business Cases Category, 2019 European Foundation for Management Development (EFMD) Case Writing Competition. In 2014, an entrepreneur in Cape Town, South Africa, started SweepSouth with her husband. Their mission was to enable dignified home cleaning work for the most vulnerable blue-collar workers, and they offered several services to empower them. When the company struggled to meet the demand for domestic services over the December holiday period, the founders realized the extent of the market’s need to connect domestic workers with potential clients. Given the entrepreneur’s business acumen and her husband’s skills and experience in software development, they created a digital platform that was often labelled the Uber of domestic services. SweepSouth employed 40 staff members and had 8,000 contractors (referred to as “SweepStars”) on the company’s platform. In 2018, the two founders wanted to scale up the business for greater social impact and had to choose among expanding the business to other African countries, expanding the service offering to office spaces, or remaining focused on serving the home and adding new services such as gardening and plumbing.