Social Impact Project for Supporting GLLI's New E-Commerce project for under-served small businesses

How This Works

As part of the TRANSFORM Support Hub, you will learn how to advance your career while getting hands on experience on projects like this one.

Project Description and Impact

GLLI (Renamed Izani) is a nonprofit organization based in South Africa's Eastern Cape that has spent over 10 years empowering unemployed youth and women in townships and rural areas with technical skills, including mobile phone repairs and entrepreneurship. While we’ve trained hundreds of women entrepreneurs we have struggled to sustain our impact due to limited funding and structural barriers faced by graduates - most notably, the lack of access to affordable stock and a reliable supply chain.

To respond, we’ve developed a new social enterprise initiative that transitions us from donor-dependence into a financially sustainable model. Through this program, we’re piloting an inventory loan and coaching model that helps alumni purchase mobile phone parts, repair, refurbish used phones and resell phones, and grow micro-businesses in their communities.

We’ve built a basic e-commerce platform (Ibalilam.com) to connect these entrepreneurs to a broader market and are setting up local distribution points in areas where our graduates are based. However, our internal team is still learning how to run an e-commerce business - from stock and customer management to digital marketing and pricing strategies. We need support to:

Set up practical operational systems,
Build team confidence
And ensure the pilot is efficient, replicable, and ready to scale.

This support is critical to helping our team take the leap from nonprofit programming to sustainable entrepreneurshipand to proving that youth- and women-led township businesses can succeed with the right tools and guidance.

Learning Opportunity

The experteer will get to experience the unique challenges and rewards of helping a grassroots African organization transition to a scalable business model. They will work closely with founders and staff, learn about digital inclusion and informal economies, and make a direct impact by helping us build systems that enable economic empowerment from the ground up.