2015_Endeavor_Hero

About Endeavor

Founded in 1997, Endeavor fosters economic growth in countries worldwide by selecting, mentoring, and accelerating high-impact entrepreneurs. Endeavor’s entrepreneurs lead fast-growing businesses that generate jobs in Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America. Endeavor provides its entrepreneurs with a network of seasoned business leaders who provide key ingredients to entrepreneurial success: mentorship, networks, strategic advice, and inspiration. Over the past 17 years, Endeavor Entrepreneurs have created more than 400,000 high quality jobs, directly reaching more than two million people across the world. Endeavor has achieved tangible results, with individuals working for Endeavor companies doubling their income over baseline or previous jobs, and Endeavor companies growing revenue 2.4 times faster than comparable firms over three years.

Current Operations of Endeavor

Endeavor is dedicated to high-impact entrepreneurship. Its main operations focus on identifying and supporting the continued growth of a select group of entrepreneurs, creating jobs, and adding revenues to foster entrepreneurship in those societies. Endeavor currently works in 21 countries across the world. In recent years, Endeavor’s operations have expanded into several countries; Endeavor launched in Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and Greece in 2012, Miami (US), Malaysia, and Morocco in 2013, and Peru and Spain in 2014.In 2011, Endeavor launched Endeavor Catalyst, a passive co-investment pool that uses donated funds to support Endeavor Entrepreneurs’ professional funding rounds and to provide funding for Endeavor’s growth and financial sustainability. Endeavor Catalyst has raised approximately $15 million to date and has made its first nine investments.

Approach and Distinguishing Features

Endeavor is an organization of, by, and for entrepreneurs. Endeavor believes that entrepreneurship is vital to economic growth and job creation, and recognizes the reality that entrepreneurs in growth markets face obstacles that inhibit successful scaling of businesses, such as limited management expertise, lack of role models, contacts, investors, etc. To this end, Endeavor provides immense support to rising entrepreneurs and acts as a springboard to catalyze their success with business establishment and job creation. Over 80% of Endeavor’s entrepreneurs give back to their local affiliates and commit to mentoring the next generation of entrepreneurs.

Endeavor’s entrepreneurs lead fast-growing, typically for-profit businesses that generate jobs and create revenues in growth markets. Endeavor looks for businesses with the potential to scale and become world-class ventures and industry leaders. Endeavor is distinct from many other organizations in its focus on high-growth, high-impact, for-profit companies that can scale. Academic research demonstrates that high-impact entrepreneurs generate a disproportionate number of jobs over other entrepreneurs.

2015 Kravis Prize


Update: 2013 award ceremony for the Henry R. Kravis Prize in Leadership

Kravis Prize founders Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis ’67 visited the CMC campus yesterday to present the 2013 Kravis Prize to Johann Olav Koss and his organization Right To Play. They presented the award to Koss during an evening ceremony held in the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum (see photograph below). Click here to read a full update on the ceremony. The award ceremony wasn’t the only item on the day’s schedule, however. Koss also talked about his organization Right To Play with Kyle Weiss ’15, a CMCer who is also helping the world with FUNDaFIELD, which builds soccer fields to help disadvantaged children: Watch an interview between Johann Koss and Kyle Weiss:   During the afternoon, five past recipients of the Kravis Prize (from Landesa, mothers2mothers, Escuela Nueva, Pratham, and FAWE) met for a lively discussion of high-impact leadership as part of a “Global Leaders Forum” sponsored by the Kravis Leadership Institute: Click here to read a full update on the Kravis Prize panel discussion...

FAWE works on reproductive health education among Kenyan girls

2008 Kravis Prize Winner FAWE’s work to educate girls in Kenya might have the added benefit of saving lives, according to a new article from the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics. FAWE’s Kenya chapter sponsors over 100 girls and 250 teachers in Kenya’s Western and Nyanza provinces, where women have a high risk of exposure to reproductive and sexual health problems, including complications during pregnancy and childbirth, exposure to HIV/AIDS, forced marriages, and female genital mutilation. The particularly high risk among rural women can be attributed in large part to the lack of awareness and education on health issues in rural Kenya. That’s where FAWE’s work comes in. The organization will teach girls about “adolescent sexual and reproductive health rights” in an effort to change the harsh realities for women in rural Kenya. This agenda fits well into FAWE’s overall mission of empowering girls and women in Africa through gender-responsive education, which it has pursued for more than two decades. FAWE CEO Oley Dibba-Wadda will talk more about the organization’s extensive education programs in sub-Saharan Africa at the Kravis Prize “Global Leaders Forum” this Thursday at Claremont McKenna College. She will be joined by Pratham co-founder Madhav Chavan and Escuela Nueva founder Vicky Colbert to discuss issues of education in India, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa. KRAVIS PRIZE CEREMONY AND RELATED EVENTS: This week: Kravis Prize presents the “Global Leaders Forum” event This week: This year’s Kravis Prize winner Johann Olav Koss presents a CMC lunchtime lecture ALSO RELATED: FAWE students tackle the issue of good governance in Rwanda 15.6% or 38.57%? Pratham disputes Indian government’s education figures...

BRAC’s frugal approach to social change

Have you ever heard of frugal innovation? That’s what happens when you help improve people’s lives but have a limited budget—an all-too-familiar situation for the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee. The 2007 recipient of the Kravis Prize, BRAC and its founder Fazle Abed have turned such limitations into a powerful learning tool by staging a Frugal Innovation Forum in March. Asif Saleh, senior director of BRAC Strategy, Communications, and Capacity, shared some of the lessons of this forum in a recent article in Forbes magazine. The reason for the BRAC forum was a simple principle: By providing a venue for the exchange of ideas, you increase the  reach and possibility of individual organizations with limited means. It’s an old, familiar idea that novelist E.M. Forster once expressed perfectly in two words in his novel “Howard’s End” — Only connect. When organizations in the non-profit sector connect and share ideas, solutions to common problems can be found far more easily than when these organizations face them alone. As BRAC’s Saleh writes in Forbes:  It’s easy to pay lip service to the need to learn from one other, but actually how one does that is not entirely understood.  Rarely can a ready-made model be dropped into a new place.  Even the process of creation is hugely important in developing a sophisticated understanding of not just what works, but why it works.  “Everyone needs to reinvent the wheel,” wrote Madhav Chavan, founder of Pratham, an incredible Indian organization transforming education nationally, “it’s important because all of us need our own kind of wheel.” Among the other lessons that Saleh passes along? It’s important to...