How have business support organisations adapted their programmes to help entrepreneurs survive the COVID pandemic?
In the land of the pandemic, shutdowns, and economic and social dislocation our partners and the entrepreneurs with whom they work faced an immediate impact.
We wanted to reflect their immense hard work, the struggle to adapt quickly, what helped, and how everyone is doing, in our Argidius Annual Report 2019, just published.
The good news
Mostly successfully, our partners scrambled to adapt their work and bring it fully online.
They focused mainly on the entrepreneurs they were already working with, new recruitment being a challenge in a crisis. In doing so, they demonstrated the qualities of leadership that are also the qualities of successful entrepreneurs, namely the ability to plan and to flexibly adapt their business and delivery models.
Meanwhile, their entrepreneurs sought to navigate this new landscape – of disrupted supply lines, economic contraction, and displaced customers.
The numbers
In all the geographies in which we work, the guesstimate split as to how entrepreneur’s small businesses were doing, backed by surveys, was consistent:
- 20% were thriving with products and services in high demand, challenged by growth
- 40% were coping
- 40% were seriously threatened with failing
The stories
Thankfully, all the enterprises featured in our 2019 Report have been able to adapt. Some like Enzi Health and the Cancer Care Café, both in Kenya, have taken on even greater significance, helping address key health needs in the current situation.
How have business support organisations adapted?
But successfully intervening to help these businesses survive has placed even more emphasis on those elements we have found that make for a good quality business support intervention, that we have acronymized as SCALE.
Leading by example, our partners doubled down, adapting their own ways of working and focusing in on entrepreneurs’ changed circumstances:
- effectively diagnosing small businesses’ and entrepreneurs’ current needs
- solving problems in real-time
- incentivizing the changing of key business practices
- making connections between entrepreneurs for peer support and learning
They also found themselves more urgently and effectively collaborating with one another, especially in building common platforms to share sources of information and help for the wider small business ecosystem.
The only aspect of SCALE suspended in this emergency has been charging fees to entrepreneurs, recognising for the most part that enterprises have to hoard every spare copper to manage their cash flow through this challenging period.
What we have learned
We know from previous, country-specific crises, that business development services, effectively applied, can significantly reduce business failure rates, in some case halving them. We, also, know that the demand for services rebound strongly after a crisis. Entrepreneurs truly realize what they do not know when facing, and surviving, an existential threat to their businesses.
For Argidius it is incumbent on us as a foundation to ensure that we sustain effective business support organisations through this crisis and beyond to ensure that the high-quality services provided by our partners continue to serve small and growing businesses in Africa, Latin America, and beyond.
Our Annual Report 2019 is titled Hope In Challenging Times because this is truly what they are.
