CREATING CREANDO (Part 2): The learning journey

By UNDP Peru Accelerator Labs

2 de Agosto de 2023

In our previous blog we described how we co-created and designed a bottom-up collective learning programme to support migrant entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs in the Peruvian host population. Our starting point was empathy, building user profiles and identifying what is a relevant value proposition for the different business categories we found among migrant enterprises.

We had identified the needs and opportunities, but how could we make it happen in only six weeks? Keep reading and find out!

Allies, assemble!

During the project’s design stage we identified five initial and recurrent barriers among migrants’ entrepreneurship ventures that we spoke with and learned from, and determined the roadmap we’d follow to build the participant’s journey:

Since one of our main tenets as a Lab is to avoid reinventing the wheel whenever possible, the CREANDO team - comprised of the Lab, UNDP Peru’s Poverty Reduction and Prosperity programme and the country office’s human mobility focal point - set out to find expert organizations in this topics that could become allies in this journey. Some of them were UN agencies or programmes, others were nonprofits that served the migrant community in Peru or academic partners, some were government agencies or even private financial sector businesses. In short, the UNDP team deployed the same platform strategy that had worked well for other projects: Involve allies that could provide knowledge and skills that could complement UNDP’s expertise.

We didn’t expect the benefits to be twofold: Participants in CREANDO could gain access to the most up to date business tools, relevant knowledge about options about financial services and network with local business associations and incubators; but at the same time all these partners were sensitized to the barriers faced by migrant entrepreneurs on a daily basis. These were our partners for the first edition of CREANDO:

Rallying the troops: The social movement strategy

Once we had the platform of allies to provide top level content, we wondered what about our participants? How would they find out about CREANDO, and when they did, would they join? Taking into account some of the insights we gained from the design stage, such as that WhatsApp groups and Facebook/IG influencers are essential to validate and legitimize open calls to courses and events, we applied a social movement strategy for CREANDO:

As with any movement, it started slow and the first few days we couldn’t keep our eyes off the registration landing page celebrating every new registered participant. However, in a few days it took a life of its own: Over 600 registered participants before we even started our six week official CREANDO journey.

For the 2023 iteration this platform of organizations, CREANDO alumni and above all over 20 grassroot organizations that support Venezuelan families all over the country, allowed us to have over 2000 registered participants in barely three weeks. Trust and recommendation networks are essential for sustainable and effective communication.

Along all these weeks preparing for CREANDO we were aware that our participants’ success and our success would depend on how we structured the learning journey. Once again, the empathy and profiling steps of the pre-design process made the difference in understanding what would work and what wouldn’t. Some issues to keep in mind:

Migrant and Peruvian entrepreneurs are extremely busy with their businesses and don’t keep usual office hours, so we couldn’t expect them to have enough time to sit for a three hour long session.
Virtual trainings are mostly taken on the go as they perform other business activities, and mostly on cell phones and not on laptops or desktops, so using Mural isn’t always easy and data issues limit using videos or even joining for the full session.
Networking with people is essential and hearing about other entrepreneurs’ successes and failures helps in uncertain times.
Entrepreneurs need specific and practical information that can be immediately applied regardless of their industry.

During our CREANDO 2022 iteration, we arranged our live sessions three times per week (1.5 hours per session), but all sessions and every single resource shared during the session was posted the next day on the Lab’s online platform, making it easier to review or watch if they couldn’t attend a specific session. Also the sessions on a single topic didn’t happen all in a single week and were sprinkled throughout the journey and built on the previous sessions, as you can see in the graph below.

The sessions were arranged in the following groups:

Yellow: Strategic canvas workshops led by the Accelerator Labs team.
Pink: Events like the launch, speaker presentations, or a final matchmaking session with Peruvian entrepreneurial organizations.
Purple: Masterclasses or financial inclusion showcases.
Green: Mentoring session with professionals that could address CREANDO entrepreneurs’ concerns one on one.

At the same time as these sessions took place, CREANDO entrepreneurs could access a financial education bite-sized course on WhatsApp with our partner MUSA.

Do you want to know more about our results? What worked and what didn’t? And what is coming next for the CREANDO community? Just keep reading! You can find the next entry here or catch up on the first post in the series here. If you have designed a project that strengthens migrant entrepreneurs’ skills and their integration with their host community, please email us at acclab.pe@undp.org and let’s share insights and learnings!