Our social entrepreneurship programs aim to create opportunities for vulnerable, isolated communities to lift themselves out of poverty and empower families to improve lives on their own. To date, MUG has three main categories of social entrepreneurship programs, with plans to expand soon.

Isuku: Soap Making with Hygiene Education

With generous seed funding from our partner, World Connect, a school-wide hygiene initiative trained eight teachers who met on Sundays to make soap. Once they had a stockpile ready to use, they taught Nyabirehe students about the importance of handwashing and rolled out a daily handwashing program at the school. In an area where water is difficult to find, and soap is a luxury, students now practice basic hygiene and know the connection between hygiene and disease prevention. The COVID-19 crisis compounded the good timing of this project, and this soap project was able to help speed the fight against COVID in real-time.  

This project has reached capacity in the space the school has, so we are making plans to expand to a multi-phase soap industry building venture. Linking of social entrepreneurship and health education created a big change in this community. In the future, we hope to measure the developments in hygiene practices with the prevention of neglected tropical diseases in this population.

Isuku Wins the 2024 Tufts $10k Friedman Prize

Isuku’s impact is evident in the local demand it has generated across the district, laying a solid foundation for business-to-consumer (B2C) operations. Looking ahead, Isuku envisions a business-to-government (B2G) agreement to subsidize soap for schools, furthering its reach and influence. 

The pilot program’s triumph has set the stage for continued B2C sales in local markets and job creation. Musanze, Rwanda’s premier tourist destination, offers fertile ground for business-to-business (B2B) contracts with hotels, leveraging the robust tourism industry to expand Isuku’s reach. 

The financial projections for Isuku are promising, with a break-even point anticipated in the first year, scaling of local market sales in the second, and expansion into the hotel industry by the fourth. Currently serving a local sector of 18,000 people, Isuku, with the support of Tufts Food & Nutrition Institute, aims to extend its B2C and B2B arms to eventually cater to the entire district’s population of 500,000.

Isuku represents a low-cost, high-impact solution to a pressing need: accessible hygiene. The enterprise is not just providing soap; it’s fostering a healthier community. With the oversight of Tufts University’s students and faculty and the financial backing of Move Up Global, Isuku is building local capacity and ensuring sustainable growth. The goal is clear: to evolve Isuku into a self-sustaining social enterprise that can be replicated across the district and, ultimately, the nation.

Isuku’s vision extends beyond the bars of soap it produces. It sees a future where families are nourished, children are energized in classrooms, and communities are interwoven with its business. With each bar of soap, Isuku is saving lives and nurturing hope for a cleaner, healthier Rwanda.

Umurava: School Feeding

In our model, we leverage schools as the hubs of social change.  We strongly believe that if we are tied together, education and health improvements can change the well-being of the community.  The government of Rwanda recalibrates its support of school feeding programs each year, but still, many families cannot afford to pay the fee of around $17 per year per child to keep their young children in school, so students end up dropping out.  Because of this, we have focussed on improving school feeding programs to fight rampant childhood malnutrition and help keep children in school.  

 In 2022, we built a chicken farm at the Nyabirehe Primary School and began providing a much-needed source of protein for each of their 1200 students. Our local partners IREME, have now modified the chicken program. We are providing one egg per student each week to the youngest grades while the older children have received instruction in caring for a chicken and been given their own chick to raise. We are carefully following up on this approach and feel that it will have long-term benefits for improving nutrition for our students and their families.

In addition, we built a large vegetable garden at the school to provide fresh vegetables year-round to the lunch program.  With the help of our partner Gardens for Health, our local team learned local innovations to maximize yields and build a sustainable farming model.  Crops such as spinach, carrots, chard, and beets yield three crops per year in this climate, so we have a rotating schedule to keep food going to school lunches.  Students come in groups to help work in the garden to learn these best practices of food production, with the goal of building skills to help their families and community while feeling pride in their own school and themselves.

Umwete: Community Outreach Combating Malnutrition

To accelerate the pace towards eliminating malnutrition, teachers and community leaders design Umwete incubators, a school, and community gardens to address persistent malnutrition with the following components. Umwete incubators include the following components: 

• School and community learning hubs. School or family-owned farms or gardens, open for families and young people to learn hands-on skills to grow their own food. Our coaching unit conducts home visits and facilitates community-based learning sessions.

• Healthy living championship:  A healthy community competition to build nutrition champions and change agents.

• Community hackathons: A space for communities to engineer ideas and develop a playbook with solutions to address food insecurity and malnutrition.

Umwete incubators constitute a school and community-defined innovation to eradicate malnutrition, neglected diseases, and other childhood illnesses.

To help improve overall community well-being, we go past the school and into the community to reach the most vulnerable families. Together with local officials, we identify families in the most dire circumstances to pilot outreach programs.  We begin by teaching them in their own homes about how to build a kitchen garden and start producing their own food.  We provide initial seedlings, training on fertilization and composting specific to this region, and ongoing check-ins to support the program's success.  

In this example, a family 11 struggled to scrape a few bites of food from the ground until we delivered a start-up garden.  Now, they report having real food to feed their children at night and proudly show off their plans to expand to a second patch.

Read the progress report here.

Livestock Program:

In March 2023, we launched a livestock-sharing program, providing some vulnerable families with sheep. This allows families to generate their income and hope for the future.  Once livestock reproduce, these families will give offspring to other needy families, transforming the community over time and empowering people to build their wealth and pay their school fees.