BiD Network Foundation

We try to achieve this by:

1. Stimulating small and medium sized entrepreneurship to create jobs and raise income in developing countries.
2. Engaging professionals, investors and organisations offering them the opportunity to directly contribute to poverty reduction through SME development in developing countries.
3. Inspiring people that business and poverty reduction can go hand-in hand.

What moves us:

The Private sector is the backbone of any economy. This is of key importance for economic development and poverty reduction in developing countries. To stimulate economic development we aim to tackle two problems:

The ‘deal- flow’ problem: over large geographical distances it is hard to find, identify and verify good business propositions in developing countries. Quality business plans and their entrepreneurs need to be made visible and accessible.

The ‘missing middle’ problem: There is a financing gap between $5.000 and $500.000 (where microfinance stops and commercial finance starts) for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in developing countries.

Our mission is to tackle these two problems. We have created the BiD Network and the BiD Challenge to support SMEs in developing countries.

Ambitions of the BiD Network Foundation

1. Establish several decentralised national BiD Challenges in developing countries
2. Bring more entrepreneurs into the BiD Network (start-up and established businesses)
3. Engage hundreds of professionals from companies and NGOs as business coaches
4. Move from a ‘prizes-only format’ to one providing loans and investments
5. Develop an online investor-to-entrepreneur lending facility

Activities since 2004

We organised 2 successful international business plan competitions (the BiD Challenge) and created this on-line community (www.bidnetwork.org), which now has 3700 active members. We received over 2000 business plans and engaged over 300 professionals from corporations and NGO’s to screen and coach plans. In the first year alone we assisted the start-up of almost 20 companies in developing countries that help reduce poverty and employ over 500 people. We expect around 30 start-ups over the 2006 Challenge.

Over 1.5 million people are reached annually with the message that poverty reduction through business can work!

The BiD Network and the BiD Challenge are growing into a movement. Since January 2007 they are joined into a new entity, the BiD Network Foundation.