Social entrepreneurship support

10 September 2018. UNITAR and Wageningen University-Environmental Sciences signed a Memorandum of Partnership to strengthen the cooperation on the SES4Food Program. Mr Nikhil Seth, Executive Director of UNITAR visited the Netherlands and signed the MOU in Hotel des Indes together with Machteld Roos of the WUR. A very important milestone in the development of the consortium between SESInc, WUR and UNITAR.

Examples of support:

SES4Food's LinkingPin in Uganda Arinaitwe Francis supports Mathias Walwana who runs the Young Farmers and Entrepreneurs Network (YOFENET).

• It is a community-based organization working in the Busoga region. 
• YOFENET promotes smart agricultural entrepreneurship with bottom-up solutions based on a social and sustainable business model. The aim is to improve livelihoods, self-employment and creating food security. One of the activities is to diversify agricultural output with new food products that are healthy and on which local enterprises can be built, like passion fruits, mushrooms (see photo), green vegetables and beekeeping.
• SES4Food works together with local organizations managed by youth, like YOFENET, aiming to improve the social entrepreneurial ecosystem and connect them with other actors in the ecosystem, ultimately increasing rural employment, income and food security through this bottom-up approach.

SES4Food supports Arnest Sebbumba, a 29 year old Ugandan agripreneur and youth worker. 

• He is the founder of Countryside Youth Foundation (CSYF), a community organization that empowers young aspiring entrepreneurs through training and mentorship with focus on breeding the next generation of agripreneurs. CSYF runs a milk value addition project bases on the principles of social entrepreneurship where it produces a probiotic yoghurt (SARN PROBIOTIC YOGHURT) - a product that addresses malnutrition, ensures access to nutritious food within the community as well as providing a market and a fair price for the milk produced by dairy farmers, thus increasing their incomes and providing employment for the youth. 
• Arnest comes from a telecommunications background having graduated with a diploma in telecommunications engineering and has vast knowledge about ICTs. Given this knowledge, he also trains the youth in the use of ICTs. 
• SES4Food aims to work together with social entrepreneurial people like Arnest and other actors in the ecosystem to improve the social entrepreneurial ecosystem for food security.

Grace-Marlène Gnintoungbe is promoter of organic farming through her farm named "Les chez Marlène " that is located in Abomey-Calavi, Benin.

• The farm produces organic vegetables and fruits. Her enterprise was born from the conviction and her passion to contribute to the protection of the environment and to contribute to a better health through nutrition. 
• She not only uses practices and methods that protect the environment, her farm is a workplace where young entrepreneurs and students come to have knowledge and training in organic farming. 
• Grace-Marlène is one of the entrepreneurs that LinkingPin in Benin has mapped. 
• Currently, SES4Food is mapping social entrepreneurs that work on food security in Low and Middle-Income Countries. Their aim is to start later this year our activities to connect these entrepreneurs with support organizations in such a way that they not only get the support they need, but also to work together on improving the entrepreneurial ecosystem in their countries.