OUR MISSION: The Sophia Akash Foundation's (SAF) mission is to facilitate sustainable paths out of poverty for the world's poor. We recognise that for those living in poverty, the essential services that enable them to build sustainable livelihoods are all too often unaffordable and/or inaccessible. Our mission is to change that.
We help build strong, sustainable Social Enterprises, using innovative solutions to meet the basic needs of poor and unserved communities. With access to affordable basic services such as financial inclusion, primary healthcare, education and others, households can break the cycle of poverty.
Sophia Akash Foundation, CIO is a charitable foundation. Our mission is to help build sustainable livelihoods for the poor and unserved in Africa and Asia. We seek to address the needs of rural communities, and help empower the female members of their households.
We do so by nurturing and developing grassroot Social Enterprises and NGOs to deliver affordable and sustainable access to livelihood enhancing services.
Through the introduction of financial inclusion, healthcare, education, sustainable farming, renewable energy, water, sanitation, better hygiene and skills development these communities are helped to lead productive and healthier livelihoods.
To date, our Foundation has helped over 65 social enterprises across low-income countries in Asia and Africa, and have improved the livelihoods of 4 million beneficiaries through the work of our partner Social Enterprises.
OUR APPROACH:
We all know that there are no magic cures or silver bullets to addressing long term poverty. Helping poor and unserved communities progress out of poverty requires a compassionate and diligent effort to deliver the right tools to help communities empower themselves.
By working closely with Social Entrepreneurs and NGOs, we help them to first understand the nature of the challenges and needs faced by the communities they endeavour to serve. Armed with a common understanding, we then assist them in building sustainable capacities, capabilities and delivery models to address these challenges and needs.
In this way, we are able to help improve these communities’ livelihoods for the longer-term, while also helping to develop affordable means with which to empower these communities and equally importantly, to help our Social Enterprise and NGO partners to evolve as scalable, sustainable enterprises, armed with a proven and very often, a replicable delivery, service and/or operating model.
We focus our efforts on providing guidance, assistance and funding support for startup, early-stage and transformational Social Enterprises and NGOs (SE Partners). We engage in collaborative efforts with our on a measured, informed basis, where mission objectives are wholly aligned. We undertake value additive, Institutional Development efforts in close collaboration with our SE Partners by providing capacity and capability building technical assistance. Our methods, developed over the last 12 years focus on undertaking a detailed Institutional and Program Assessment through which we establish a commonly understood basis for every collaborative program. Whether the effort is of a proof-of-concept nature, early-stage scaling up effort or a transformational journey, we work closely with our SE Partners and their beneficiary communities to develop and implement the required Institutional Development and Institutional Strengthening Plan. Our incubatory and accelerative efforts are supported by a carefully designed Monitoring & Evaluation capability coupled with an Impact Measurement and Knowledge Sharing methodologies designed specifically for each collaborative program.
Our collective goals are to help develop the effective "recipe" (i.e. business service model for our SE Partners) which will help ensure that the beneficiary communities and their households, especially the female members are suitably empowered, educated and/or trained to adopt the required skills, resources and/or means with which they can themselves enhance and sustain their livelihoods to progress themselves out of their poverty circumstances.
