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What is farip? / farips financing policy / How farip implements ventures / The people behind farip / Official documents and papers / Banking Details

How farip is funded

Sponsors for scouting and R&D
Scouting for ideas by rural Africans that may evolve into viable ventures, and doing the required R&D to assess whether there is something there, is the unique key activity of farip that primes the process. Sponsors provide grants specified for scouting and R&D in general. Any unspecified grants are also put to work here.

Sponsors for “active ventures”.
Once an idea is formulated enough and it is clear which rural entrepreneurs will try it out to see whether it can become a viable business for them, it becomes a farip “active venture” in the pre-commercial phase. Sponsors provide grants specified for one or the other active venture. farip then invests in the specified ventures as “social” venture capital. Should a venture be successful, the returns are reinvested in farip. A success is when a venture becomes an investable start-up that farip can hand over to commercial (social) investors providing normal loans.

Sponsors for capacity building and training
Once rural entrepreneurs are in their pre-commercial phase or later during their start-up phase, they often must learn special technical or operational skills or general business skills. Much of this must happen through mentored peer-exchange learning in order to scale up or replicate the ventures. Sponsors provide grants specified for such on-the-job capacity building.

Donors for specific tasks
Donor agencies can ask farip to look into a particular location or region or theme to come up with suggestions how farips methods may be usefully applied there. Such tasks are implemented as normal consultancies.

farip aims to spend half of the available funds for scouting, R&D and capacity building, and the other half in active ventures.