The Ugandan Founder Working on the $4.5T Climate Finance Gap
Welcome to the first of many Innovator Highlights from CrowdSolve - the “home base for climate innovation”. These Highlights feature the stories of entrepreneurs all over the world working to address the climate crises with innovative, business-driven solutions. At the end of the story, you will find the Innovator’s contact information. We hope you will reach out with any encouragement, feedback and connections you find relevant.
15 years ago, Abdul Semakula co-founded a web agency after graduating with a degree in Computer Science. It all started when one client moved to Dubai and referred Abdul’s agency to another client there. The chain of recommendations continued to grow until they had over 1,500 clients across the globe, a 15-person staff, over 50 freelancers producing over 550M Uganda Shillings (UGX) in revenue.
While growing the agency, Abdul would see a lady each morning along the road to his office. This woman would stand with a megaphone calling traffic-jammed drivers to contribute any amount of means to help care for her children batting malignant cancer tumors.
After more than five months of seeing her call to the same faces, Abdul knew her “model” wasn’t working and found a way to offer her support. Putting his digital innovation skills to work, he created a fundraising campaign to help this woman. It was during this time he found the fundraising processes being used all over the world were infested with middlemen making funding slow, costly, and inefficient.
Shortly after this experience, Abdul took a 40-day sabbatical and found himself questioning his role in digital work. While he’d been living in a world of optimizing for wealth accumulation, he began to wonder how the system could instead be optimized for wealth distribution. It was then he decided to quit to focus on building a better system - one that increases the volume and velocity of funds reaching grassroots social and environmental activities.
How Abdul is Creating a Better World
There is currently a $4.5T climate finance gap - and Abdul has come to see this gap as due not to lack of money, but largely because our main tools of finance are designed to maximize personal wealth accumulation as opposed to distribution.
Abdul’s innovation, Commonflow, offers a financial account built with distributive wealth sharing in mind, increasing the volume of climate funds available and the speed at which the funds can reach grassroots initiatives.
With the maturity of social tech and fintech, digital currencies, blockchain technology and a growing consumer demand for positive impact, Abdul sees an opportunity to design a new type of financial account with these balancing features:
An account built with distributive wealth sharing in mind to increase the volume of climate funds.
An account built with collective control in mind, to increase the velocity at which the funds reach the grassroots activities.
Where Commonflow is Now
Since beginning work on Commonflow, Abdul has created customer journey maps, use-case diagrams and a sprint brief to co-create a community financial account. As a concept-stage founder, he is using CrowdSolve to develop his business model and receive direct feedback on the idea.
“The deck design, the story, the business model, the writeup, the competitor analysis, the entire concept - you can't know what to improve, how, and where. Sometimes I followed up with even those who never responded asking for what I needed to improve and 9 in 10 times you never get a response… Crowdsolve fixes a much-neglected but important gap for concept-stage founders. [The] model is God-sent!”
Abdul is now looking for a reputable project partner (in a country with above-average digital payments penetration) to convene key partners and prototype the first MVP. The MVP will ideally bring together partners such as fintech providers, retail payment providers, businesses, and their customers to design and test this new model of financial accounts.
Want to help Abdul grow his Innovation? Reach out to share ideas, feedback, connections and encouragement.
Contact: asemakula@gmail.com
CrowdSolve is the mentor-assisted platform helping concept-stage climate founders refine their ideas and launch. Interested in joining as an innovator or mentor? Join the beta test now here.