Articles by "Entrepreneurship"
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It can help achieve several consumer-facing goals, including community building, influencer outreach, native advertising and social commerce

The noise on social media has reached a fever pitch—to even be heard over the din, entrepreneurs in Asia Pacific have to produce moving content on a daily basis, or allocate a large advertising budget. As none of these strategies is cost-effective, entrepreneurs need to look for nascent channels to reach new users and customers. One of the most promising is livestreaming, which has already gone mainstream in China, where it is set to exceed box office receipts, and is fast growing in the rest of Asia.

Forward-thinking entrepreneurs would be wise to look at livestreaming as a major touch point for their brand, as it will enable them to accomplish a variety of consumer-facing goals, including everything from community building and influencer outreach to native advertising and social commerce. As livestreaming in the region has often gone under the radar in favour of more mass-market industries like ride-hailing, here’s everything that entrepreneurs need to know about the medium’s potential for their brand in Asia.

Community Building

Livestreaming can accelerate your community building efforts. Many brands try to build communities around their business, be they for their service providers or end users, through Facebook or LinkedIn groups. Livestreaming may be an effective way to jumpstart your community building, as it represents such a major shift from how we normally interact online.

Rather than interact with other users asynchronously on a group or a board—that is, not in real-time—livestreaming gives people the opportunity to interact with one another as its name hints: live. Shared experiences on digital, such as responding to the same show or participating in the same challenges, can forge stronger relationships among users and between them and your brand.

Influencer marketing

Livestreaming may make influencer marketing accessible again. The rise of globetrotting influencers on social media platforms like Instagram has placed influencer marketing beyond the reach of most entrepreneurs. With fees for a single post commanding up to tens of thousands of dollars, only large corporates can realistically work with influencers on a regular basis.

Livestreaming restores influencer marketing as a tool to the vast majority of entrepreneurs. Since audiences on livestreaming platforms tend to be more intimate, fees are not only more affordable (with some even accepting in-kind payment), but the results may be more impactful. When a livestreamer shares a product or service with their audience, viewers do not simply like a post and then scroll on as they would on Instagram. The influence wielded by influencers on livestreaming platforms is much deeper: Viewers sit, watch, and listen, in what for many is one of the few uninterrupted breaks during their day.

More pull

Livestreaming may bring you more bang for your advertising buck. One of the most commonly touted advertising metrics in digital marketing is cost per impression, which tracks the cost for every thousand impressions. No equivalent metric exists for livestreaming. Why? Because viewers do not simply look at a livestreaming feed and then click away, as they would with a banner ad or social media post. Each viewer is instead glued to their phone, giving the kind of undivided attention that other channels can only dream of.

With this level of intimacy, any form of advertising—not just influencer marketing—becomes more efficient. Entrepreneurs have many tactics to choose from. They can create branded content in collaboration with livestream show producers, provide ads that can air during relevant programs, or even embed themselves directly into the platform.

Sales channel

Livestreaming can even be a sales channel. Many entrepreneurs may erroneously assume that livestreaming is only for top-of-the-funnel marketing activities. Such could not be further from the truth. In every market where livestreaming has matured, there is always a natural evolution toward commerce, with viewers ordering products that the livestreamers is talking about, interacting with, or even wearing.

Commerce on livestreaming is almost like a private version of home shopping, made interactive to the extreme. Viewers can pose questions to the livestreamer, request they test the product in different ways, or even ask for recommendations. Brands appreciate this level of interactivity, as it spurs more sales from often fastidious Asian shoppers.

While streaming, of course, does present its own challenges, brands in Asia Pacific should look to the new medium with gusto. It’s a channel that presents many opportunities for the entrepreneur discerning enough to see livestreaming not just as a trend they need to tap, but as a future they must prepare for.
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November 18, 2018
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Ashoka, In Uganda, where many women earn as little as $3 per month, a new generation of agri-entrepreneurs are lifting themselves out of poverty. They are doing so with the support of KadAfrica, a social business that grants out-of-school girls with a small plot of land, passionfruit vines, and a marketplace to sell the fruit.
KadAfrica provides intensive training in entrepreneurship, financial literacy and gender empowerment. Thus far, 1,650 girls have boosted their incomes to $20 – $50 per month—representing a 600% increase in income per participant. Some young women have used the money to expand their agribusinesses, and others have started new ventures, such as a nursery school for local children.
Launched in 2012 by husband-and-wife team Eric and Rebecca Kaduru, KadAfrica has seen its program grow exponentially–more than a thousand young women are already on the organization’s waiting list. Last year, KadAfrica was named a winner of the MasterCard Foundation and Ashoka’s Future Forward, a challenge to solve youth employment in Africa. Through Future Forward’s networking opportunities, Eric was invited to the White House’s Global Entrepreneurship event and the Young Africa Works Summit in Cape Town.
Eric first conceived of KadAfrica when he was driving from Uganda to Kenya and wondered why thriving, large-scale commercial farming did not exist on Uganda’s fertile land. Eventually, the organization settled on cultivating passion fruit, which is popular in Ugandan marketplaces while 70 percent of the supply is imported. The vertical vines require relatively little land to grow and the fruit commands high prices in the marketplace. Through bulk marketing and transport, KadAfrica is able to operate a profitable business, providing income for the girls and sustaining the organization. It’s recent expansion last year relied primarily on self-generated funds–less than 50 percent came from donor dollars.
Continuing to amplify the impact of KadAfrica, Eric has been incorporating lessons learned from participating in Future Forward, including how to refine his approach to communicating with funders and stakeholders. Eric worked with the team at Overture, a video production company that helps individuals like Eric introduce themselves in less than 60 seconds.  “I learned how to tell a story,” Eric said. “It was insanely beneficial. I have been able to summarize what I do in ways I didn’t think was possible.”
His advice: “Personalize the story–give the story a face. Explaining what we do at KadAfrica is one thing, but giving you a story about a particular person we work with and how their life has changed, is another.”
KadAfrica has also begun shifting its perspective toward the local communities where the young women live. “We were initially very focused on trying to get more girls committed to the program, and getting more support staff on the ground,” Eric said. “But we’re seeing things from a broader perspective now and involving the girls’ families in order to create a more enabling environment. This has been a key shift.”
Incorporating the community into KadAfrica has helped prevent issues where a young woman’s father or husband might object to her participation in the program. “In some situations, a girl married at a young age might find that her husband was hiding her tools or not letting her leave the house, because there was still housework to be done, for example,” Eric said.
“He might ask, ‘What are you doing all day, in this place?’ But by engaging the family, we can provide them with information about exactly what the young women are doing, and that has really enabled them to work more effectively, rather than having the parents or husbands fighting the idea.”
KadAfrica engages the women’s families through empowerment ceremonies where the girls receive certificates for their accomplishments. They also host events like barbeques so that the communities can learn more about how the women are succeeding with their agribusinesses.
“It helps everyone understand the scale of the program,” Eric said. “And that definitely has a long-run effect on how things work. There is much less resistance and more support.”
Smart business sense and the knowledge for creating social impact are continuing to help KadAfrica empower young women to become entrepreneurs themselves. Having established proof-of-concept, the organization plans on enrolling 3000 growers over the next two years, which will enable to them to supply juice companies with Ugandan passion fruit pulp, rather than imported pulp. According to KadAfrica, “This would allow us to purchase from out growers at a price point of 30% higher than what is currently sustainable, keeping wealth within Uganda.”
April 18, 2016

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