We are proud to announce the winner of the Gexsi Social Pitch | SensAbility 2020
In March, we had to cancel the Gexsi Social Pitch at the SensAbility Impact Summit at the WHU Business School. We therefore took-up the pitch digitally. We are proud to present the following winner!
1st prize – 2.500€
mango solar
The young start-up which just has been founded by three students as a university spin-off convinced the jury by enriching the market for solar home systems in Africa through new digitalized solutions for solar lighting and further basic good and services, the pay-as-you-go model which targets low-income communities in remote off-grid regions, the blend of German engineering and local production as well as the entrepreneurial, energetic team with a strong ethical vision.
Community Award – 2×500€
Pompei Project & GROME
In addition we created a community award which reflects the public online voting. The award is shared among two projects which scored almost evenly. We evaluated the the likes and comments (with each comments being equivalent to two likes) of all the project posts featured on the instagram and facebook accounts of both Gexsi and SensAbility. Both projects tackle highly relevant topics which concern all of us, in particular reducing plastic waste in the oceans + making the fashion industry fair and sustainable (Pompei Project) and creating awareness for local, healthy fresh food, boosting the urban gardening movement (GROME).
Runner up – Moufense
We are happy to announce that the student-led project Moufense which identified a new, effective way to mainstream Malaria protection across the rural population in Togo wins the Gexsi Runner Up Award. Moufense already was among the top-ranked finalists in our first Impact Challenge and scored very high again this time. The Runner up Award consists in a free slot to be featured, promoted and financial supported through our Gexsi online platform sometime within the next 12 months.
We are particularly excited that all awardees are young, innovative social startups which are a crucial point to take-off. We hope that our award can help to give each project a boost.
CHECK OUT ALL 10 FINALISTS
Find below the 10 finalists, all of which excite us! For the community award we evaluated both the likes and comments across all social media accounts, i.e. the Instagram and the facebook posts of both the Gexsi and the SensAbility social media accounts: #GexsiSocialPitch
In our Instagram Highlight Story “Social Pitch” you find videos of the founders of the projects.
All projects can also be found on the Facebook accounts of Gexsi and SensAbility.
Thanks again for all your votes for and comments on your 
Social Startup!
ABOUT THE CHALLENGE
- Starting July 6th, we will present to you 11 exciting and innovative projects that make the world a better place and which all contribute to the #17GlobalGoals.
- The award prize is 2500 Euro and the winning project will be officially supported on the Gexsi website.
- We believe in the power of social entrepreneurship. Many good initiatives need funding at a very early stage to build a prototype and to reach their proof of concept. We would like to enable social innovators to ramp up their ideas in order to get to the next step.
- We encourage the winners to adopt the pay-forward principle. In case your startup succeeds, we invite you to pay back the funds earmarked to support further social innovators. This way we create a impact finance wave.
- Find out more about the Gexsi Impact Challenges in or Gexsi blog.
YOUR OPION MATTERS!
All you need to do is this:
- Follow our Facebook or Instagram account.
- Like the post of your favourite project.
- Name your favourite project in the comments below and tag them!
OUR IMPACT CRITERIA
In a nutshell, we ask the following questions to evaluate an initiative or a social start-up (simply called “project” hereafter):
- Is it committed to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), contributes to these Global Goals in various respects?
- Does it develop a new, inspiring, social entrepreneurial solution, based on a sustainable social business model?
- Is the project at a crucial point where it needs support? Can we, by providing media reach + moderate funding, make a difference?
If you like to take a deep dive, take a look how we assessed the winning project of our initial impact challenge, which we piloted last winter – Health4Bees:
FAQ
No, the submission of project proposals ended early March. Due to the lockdown the live pitches at the SensAbility Impact Summit could not take place. For the online pitch, we work with the same pool of nominations. For the digital format, however, we decided to give 5 more projects a chance to present themselves than would have been possible at the live event.
The winning team will be decided jointly by the SensAbility team, the Gexsi team, and our external jury, which consists as of now of David Lais (Organisation für Nachhaltigen Konsum), David Diallo (Good Impact Foundation) and Oliver Kuschel (Impact Factory). The social media feedback also counts in as one vote.
We have a budget of 2.500€ which we plan – as of now – to allocate to one single project, the winner of the SensAbility Gexsi Social Pitch 2020.
Many social innovators identify a solid business model which allows to generate significant revenues. In this case we encourage our winning teams to consider paying back the funds, following the pay-forward principle. The money will then be used to support another social startup in need of support.
The idea is that the money is paid back whenever you are in a good position to do so, either because you gained a major investor (with much larger funds than us), or because you generate sufficient market revenues. Sometime, our support may only be needed to bridge any short time period, until your first clients pay. The timeline will be defined individually. We do not take any margin (fees, interest rate), but are happy about any donation which you make on top, in case of success.
Yes! We encourage sponsors and donors to increase the prize money or match the funds we can provide. Donations can be made through the Good Impact Foundation, which Gexsi legally is embedded in.
If interested, best contact us directly: andreas@gexsi.com
We plan to run our third impact challenge during Fall 2020 with a partner still to be defined. We are excited to replicated and scale the scheme to help the social impact sector grow!
We hope so! We seek to continue and steadily expand the partnership with SensAbility, based on the strong mission alignment which we have.
You like to nominate a project?
We support inspiring social innovators not only within the Impact Challenge format.