CLOUD-SOCIOPRENEUR: Building Viable Bridges! With S6startUP & Giving Garage Chaste Christopher Inegbedion Has An Evident Passion For Start-ups In Sub-Saharan Africa

Among the many names given to the last quarter of 2015, the ‘year of Cloud-Sociopreneur’ seems to stick in ways others don’t. Cloudpreneurs are essential for sub-Saharan Africa’s growth and for achieving the Millennium Development Goal of halving poverty by 2015.

Just as entrepreneurs change the face of business, social entrepreneurs act as the change agents for society, seizing opportunities others miss and improving systems, inventing new approaches, and creating solutions to change society for the better. While a business entrepreneur might create entirely new industries, a social entrepreneur comes up with new solutions to social problems and then implements them on a large scale.

The narrative of cloud-socioprenurship is about to change with S6 STARTUP! It's no secret, Social Start Up Saturday with over 40 editions, 25 Million Impressions, Over 600,000 Twitter Account Reach likes to celebrate the success of social innovators. And rightly so! Their incredible work not only changes the world, but their stories fuel the movement for social good by inspiring others to do the same. But behind the successes, there is also struggles, challenges and failures. There are the stories we often don't hear and yet, they are just as important to understanding what it takes to be a social innovator.

In this story, is a chat with Chaste Christopher Inegbedion, Founder of Modern Social Good Business, he is establishing the first business of social good on the cloud and he is obsessed with tracking every other startup in the world and applying them locally to improve the Small & Growing Business Sector with a sworn mission for startup to ‘make more money and more impact’.

After successfully completing their Microsoft Cloud startup Academy, Chaste Christopher Inegbedion and Bukola Adeboye Joined forces with Ayodele Ayowole-obi as co-producers to help identify prospective startups to share their untold stories tagged S6startup!

Also an on- and offline tech-themed resource for startups, S6startUP is redefining the role of cloud-socioprenurship in the 21st century by basing its business on three core principles: creating buyer and shareholder value, playing a key role in social and economic development, and contributing to society's satisfaction.

STARTUP JOURNEY
S6startUP Follows a StartUPasAservice (SAAS) model with a 25 million impression by extending its impact to other countries like Kenya, Ghana, Morocco, South Africa as well as Los Angeles, New York and Palo Alto, with representation from Enterprise Development Centre and Nigeria Youth Chamber of Commerce. We now hope in the upcoming months to host venture capital funds among our list of clients, which also include mergers & acquisition specialists, product managers, founders and aspiring entrepreneurs. While firms like Mara Mentors and Enterprise Radio provide similar services, S6startUP allows the start-up to showcase their initiatives and allows investors to get an overview of a sector within our ecosystem before drilling down to individual companies.

99% of the companies we have worked with are Start-up’s and we have been able to help them enlarge their businesses by giving them an online promotional experience and ROI (return on investment). Some of these companies include BudgIT, Vacant Board, EPINEC, CSR in Action, Studio Apa, Hutbay, AWEP (Africa Women Entrepreneurship Network) and many more

S6startup is unique in solving this problem, using investment not charity, but like any company it needs investors willing to back it. When investors back a company like S6startup they are not only hoping to make a profit, they are hoping to change the lives of tens of thousands of small and growing business. That’s the essence of a form of investment that is now being called ‘impact investment’.

Editor's Note: This post was written by Onigbinde Oluseun, Ashoka Fellow, Harambe Fellow, Knight Fellow, TFA Alumni & Team Lead BudgIT and this was originally prepared for the 2015 Global Child Forum for Southern Africa in Pretoria & Social Capital Markets in San Francisco.

PROFILE OF A CLOUDSOCIOPRENEUR - CHASTE CHRISTOPHER INEGBEDION

Chaste Christopher Inegbedion was born in Lagos, Nigeria by parents who instilled in him, a sense of need to make a positive social impact in the world.

After secondary school, rather than take the conventional route, Chaste chose to set-up a study group while waiting to go to the Olabisi Onabanjo University (OOU) to further his education. In the process, he was struck by the inner desire to check the escalating rate of peer pressure among the youths and a sure means of preventing them from cybercrime which was very high at that time (The Millennium Bug Y2K) for pre-university students and he also began to think about how he could correct this social injustice and level the playing field for meaningful interaction.

While studying Computer Engineering in OOU, Chaste contributed immensely as a member of the Rotary, Lions and Junior Chamber International Families, accordingly.

In Yola, during the one year National Youth Service, Chaste intensified more on his initiative tagged, ‘Brown Heart Foundation & Creative Five World’ that would create jobs and promote health in families.

Years later, Chaste received a Chartered Certification in Public Relations from the Nigeria Institute of Public Relations. He sought to create an impact using social media for social good. He later returned to Lagos where he believed he could create more social impact than sitting on a job in the upper echelons of Adamawa state government. Before his return to Lagos, he worked with the American University of Nigeria, Nigeria Union of Journalism, Nigeria Television Authority (NTA), NEPAD, UNDP,MDGs and the likes as a Volunteer.

Also while serving Nigeria as a Youth Corps member in Adamawa State, Chaste contributed to the treatment of a mutilated 5 year old girl called Pwashika Nideno. The little girl got a lot of media attention and financial support for her surgery.

Chaste Inegbedion’s Charity Lounge was also created to put the Fun in ‘Fundraising’ and in the process, celebrate those who are giving for the benefit of others. The young man decided that he wanted to replicate the social impact of ‘Charity Lounge’ on a more massive scale. Hence, he enrolled in the Cloud startup Academy hosted by Microsoft, Fate Foundation and Mara Mentors with the intention of developing his plans for S6startup product.

At the Academy, Chaste was focused on creating S6startup and had capitalized on his infectious ability to motivate others to join him. In every class, his emphasis was more on collaboration. He compelled people to tell their untold stories via social media and its dynamic tools.

Chaste hopes to learn more about creating social change through business by applying for SOCAP15 . These will involve leading impact investors, world-class entrepreneurs, and innovative cross-sector practitioners on October 6-9. They will converge for three full days of networking and engaging content at the intersection of money and meaning. Chaste got partial scholarships to attend the event.

Chaste is unlocking the potential of small business entrepreneurs in developing countries by providing management know-how and links to financing. In countries like Nigeria, small business entrepreneurs have unparalleled potential to create new jobs and wealth in the formal economy. However, small and medium scale enterprises (SMEs) in the developing world have, in time past, been constrained by entrepreneurs´ limited business skills and the lack of access to capital.

Chaste & Partners have developed a comprehensive model to provide small-scale, impact entrepreneurs in Nigeria with the business expertise, telling their untold stories and providing links with long-term investment capital they need to transform economies.

S6startup, the Social Good Brand of Creative5 arm of Chaste’s organization targets entrepreneurs with high potential to grow and create new jobs and provides them with educational opportunities and digital media services. Working with Social Media Influencers, S6startup recruits experts to help entrepreneurs develop strategies for problem solving including pricing, scaling-up and accessing new markets.

Through the Social Start Up Saturday, Chaste facilitates long-term impact investment into small businesses. Considering their small size, lack of sophistication, and location in developing countries where financial markets operate sluggishly, small business entrepreneurs have virtually no access to long-term growth capital.

Social Start Up Saturday helps them tell their untold stories via their weekly tweet chat, opening opportunities for funding especially for businesses caught in the “missing middle”– they are too big to receive microcredit and too small to be of interest to traditional venture capitalists or even business incubators. Chaste is using s6startup to demonstrate to donors, future business leaders, and investors that, investing in impact entrepreneurs in the developing world is an effective means to fight poverty and unemployment.

Just as Muhammad Yunus used Grameen Bank to demonstrate the feasibility of banking to the poor, Mr. Inegbedion is using S6startup, the first social enterprise cloud based digital agency for startups in Nigeria, to show that entrepreneurs in the developing world are a profitable target for socially impactful investment.

Showcase & Award (Other Milestones)
The G.G Project was showcased at the Third UN World Conference on Disaster Risk & Reduction in Sendai-Japan as a Youth Friendly Environmental Space in its Pilot Stage and as a case example at Shared Value Initiatives conference in New York in May 2015.

‘Giving Garage’ also won the best idea never produced –campaign in the 2015 Summit Creative Award competition with more than 5000 submissions from 23 countries hosted by the Summit International Awards.

Chaste has been presented with the opportunities to present both innovations at the Young Diplomats Forum taking place between the 7th and 11^th of September in London but at the same time is expected at the Global Children Forum for Southern Africa co-hosted by the Embassy of Sweden in Pretoria alongside his colleague Chineye Okoro who is a speaker at the event. He is seeking Public Spirited Individuals and brands delegate sponsorship to enable him attend and fulfil his dreams of projecting the country image on a global scale at the Social Media Week in London and SOCAP 15

We wish him a successful deliberation.
Follow Chaste Christopher Inegbedion on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ChasteCharity