Blog Post 10

Sources of Funding For Ukweli

Our team has also created a crowdfunding video as a way to further enhance our efforts. The video showcases the general synopsis of the venture from the problem statement, to our proposed solution.

Here is a link! https://www.lehighcrowdfunding.com/campaigns/ukweli-test-strips

Moreover, our partner World Hope International in Sierra Leone has agreed to match our donations up to $6,000.00. This funding is dependent on the funding that we receive from the crowdfunding campaign.

We are looking at grants that call for interventions focused in promoting pregnant mother and neonate health outcomes. The SL@B grant for example, focuses on these venerable populaces living in rural and hard to reach areas around the world. We are looking for grants to help support our particularly high overhead costs and cost of goods sold. These grants will help us go from the validation stage of our venture to the transition to scale stage.

Income Statement

The first three years after it has official launched as a venture in Sierra Leone. As you can see, we are expecting large increases in sales each year for the first three years, but all of the costs associated with the venture increase as well, leading to the losses in total income increasing. Although these losses may be concerning, it is not unusual for this to happen to non-profit and social ventures when assessing income just based o of sales.One of the assumptions that was made in the creation of the income statement for the sales account is that the messaging and advertising for the venture is effective, and awareness of Ukweli and its services increases and spreads to other parts of Sierra Leone outside of the Bombali District that the venture is currently focusing on. With awareness of the venture growing, more women will know the importance of getting screened for UTIs and Preeclampsia, which will therefore mean more boxes of strips will be sold, which obviously would create more revenue for our venture. The assumption that the current mindset of doing nothing regarding UTI and Preeclampsia signs and symptoms will change during the time can also tie into the idea of sales increasing. Even if the workers on the ground follow protocol in advertising the strips, if people don’t change their attitude about not doing anything if they experience symptoms that could be related to UTIs and Preeclampsia, then the strips would not sell as well as we would hope.

Some other assumptions we have made that relate to the cost of goods sold account is that the rate we are getting for the test strips will continue to be roughly the same. This would most likely be the case if we continue to work with our current Original Equipment Manufacturer, WangCheng, so that is something we factored in.

We also assume that the overhead for the venture will continue to be high. From what Ukweli has observed, the overhead is very high for the venture, and we did not anticipate for those rates to decrease when the income statement was created.