Written by Lillian Nduati from Impact Hub Africa

This July, Impact Hub Candidates Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), Freetown (Sierra Leone) and Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of Congo), were in Impact Hub Prague for their Sister Hub visit.

The teams are part of the Africa Resilience program (in partnership with Cordaid), a seed program that supports entrepreneurial teams interested in starting an Impact Hub in cities that have challenging complex political and social environments. The Sister Hub visit is a peer-based system where older established Impact Hubs guide new initiatives as they become Impact Hubs.

The Impact Hub Prague team provided in-depth seminars into all the areas of operation required to run a successful Impact Hub. They shared stories, successes, failures and best practices, based on 5 years of working, growing and struggling to create an impactful and socially relevant space in their community.
Besides having an incredible space, community and team, Impact Hub Prague founded two more spaces in their country, in Ostrava and Brno (the second of which the candidate teams had the opportunity to visit, also be warmly hosted at and be awed by its beauty).

“For us, the visit was timely as we were keen to have a more in depth understanding of the governance issues faced by thriving hubs both during the initial start up and in scaling up. My biggest take away was that the team at Praha and Brno was the key to the hub’s success.”
– Impact Hub Candidate Team, Freetown (Sierra Leone)

The sister hub visits are an important element of the Seed program, providing an opportunity for candidate teams to see an Impact Hub in action, to ask questions and collect inspiration for their own hubs. This trip provided an invaluable experience for the candidate Impact Hubs to connect with other network members, and most of all, to see that our similarities are greater than our differences; in the journey to establishing an Impact Hub, we all face similar challenges, and this sharing with peers is a great way to learn from each other’s mistakes, to celebrate their successes and go forth to create the best Impact Hub possible.

Find out more about:
Africa Resilience program
Africa’s Impact Hub Candidate teams:
– Addis Ababa (Ethiopia)
– Freetown (Sierra Leone)
– Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of Congo),