Social entrepreneurs are often looking for a way to improve their businesses, scale and grow but when they look at the growing sea of incubators and accelerators designed to help them, it can be difficult to decipher which to choose and whether it will help the business reach its objectives.
Meant to provide technical assistance to burgeoning businesses, these incubators and accelerators have cropped up as the social entrepreneurship field grows and evolves. But the question of whether these incubators or accelerators are effective, and what makes them so, is one that leaves many questions.
Certainly some incubators have helped launch successful companies — take the famous example of Y Combinator in the technology sector as an example. But developing world entrepreneurs may well have a different set of needs.
About the author
Adva Saldinger@AdvaSal
Adva Saldinger is a Senior Reporter at Devex where she covers development finance, as well as U.S. foreign aid policy. Adva explores the role the private sector and private capital play in development and authors the weekly Devex Invested newsletter bringing the latest news on the role of business and finance in addressing global challenges. A journalist with more than 10 years of experience, she has worked at several newspapers in the U.S. and lived in both Ghana and South Africa.