Led by two Jamaican Entrepreneurs, Valrie Grant, Founder of GeoTechVision and A. Cecile Watson, Founder of PitchandChoose.com, FundRiseHER™, is First Commonwealth Crowdfunding Initiative, to Target Caribbean Women Entrepreneurs.
FundRiseHER™ was announced at the recent CARICOM Heads of Government Meeting, by Valrie Grant, the Commonwealth Woman Entrepreneur of the Year, A. Cecile Watson, CEO of pitchandchoose.com, a crowdfunding platform and Arif Zaman, Executive Director, Commonwealth Businesswomen’s Network in collaboration with the Caribbean Export Development Agency.
Powered by pitchandchoose.com, the crowdfunding platform for the Caribbean, seeks to leverage crowdfunding to attract new flows of capital to the region, and ultimately to create new jobs and drive economic growth.
The game changing FundRiseHER™ initiative, was developed with input from the Commonwealth Businesswomen’s Network. FundRiseHER™, which has been launched to be a proof of concept for crowdfunding as a vehicle of economic development in the Commonwealth, is being piloted in the Caribbean with crowdfunding campaigns starting in early September.
The initiative will be spearheaded by Gr8Way Consulting Ltd. out of Jamaica, which will lead the charge throughout the region to deliver on the initiative’s 1:10:50 goal: $1 million grant funding target to be raised through a global rewards-based crowdfunding campaign by 10 participating Caribbean countries/territories and Commonwealth member states for the benefit of 50 women entrepreneurs. The size of grants will be between USD$10,000 and USD$25,000.
FundRiseHER™ was launched in response to the 2013 Commonwealth Heads of Government “call for innovative, inclusive and accessible financing mechanisms as well as capacity building to advance women’s entrepreneurship.’ In May 2016 in the Seychelles, Small States across the Commonwealth (home to 31 such states), specifically said that they ‘should also explore the potential of crowdfunding for accessing smaller scale financing for development’ and only in June in London, Commonwealth ICT Ministers committed to ‘continue to build capacity, paying particular attention to the emerging and over-the-horizon technologies and taking into account the needs of women.”
We wish them stunning success with this initiative.
