THE VIRTUAL INSTRUCTION PLATFORM OF ACCEL ACADEMIES OF CONGO
Our business and admin services contractor: Congo American
For operational and logistical services, Accel Academies retains Congo American LC, a business services company from the United States. Congo American is owned by American and Congolese investors, education partners, and Congo American employees and contractors ranging from Congolese cleaners and runners to visiting American professionals.
The objectives of a charity with the sustainability of a business.
Most initiatives funded by charities are permanently dependent on the flow of money from abroad. As soon as the flow stops, so does the initiative.
Congo American takes a different approach. Congo American provides support for non-profit organizations, but Congo American itself is a business, not a charity. It has social development objectives but it doesn't have endless deep pockets. Our clients receive charitable contributions, but are not reliant on annual fund-raising campaigns.
Congo American provides administrative support services and consulting for our non-profit education clients with the objective of making them economically self-sufficient within their first two years of operation. Their sustained growth ensures Congo American's sustained growth as their service provider. This hybrid approach couples social objectives with profit incentives, attracting the good management and innovation required to make a long-term difference in the Congo.
Addressing the "missing middle" in development.
Efforts to help developing countries tend to focus either on large, public projects like highways, hospitals and stadiums, or small, village-scale efforts aimed at very disadvantaged populations. Both are valuable and very important.
But Congo American focuses on the "missing middle": market-driven enterprises that serve Africa's growing middle class and can thus become economically self-sustaining. These enterprises are platforms for training entrepreneurs, managers, technicians and professionals who can then work to grow the enterprise or leave to create new enterprises. This approach creates new private-sector jobs and new opportunities while spreading positive principles of business management and introducing the power of combining the best international practices with the strongest aspects of local wisdom and culture.
The result is a growing ecosystem of enterprises and relationships that propagates positive principles ever deeper into Congolese society. Once an enterprise is economically self-sustaining in its middle-class niche, it will then develop valuable products that are affordable for the lower-income market, the millions at the "bottom of the pyramid" who have immense collective purchasing power and are hungry to improve the prospects for themselves and their children.
All of Congo American's business and social objectives center around the overall goal of developing social capital -- defined as the value of trust in a society -- without which a society will never truly develop. Read more on this at Bomoto.one.