Spring Accelerator for transforming lives of poor and vulnerable girls launches in Pakistan

Spring Accelerator is launching in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. The accelerator aims to empower businesses which are focussing on transforming the lives of poor and vulnerable girls aged between 10-19. The official launch of the accelerator will be along with the first cohort of inducted businesses. For this reason, applications are open and deadline to apply for the application is May 31st, 2016.

Supported by DFID, the Nike Foundation, and USAID, the accelerator is promising to provide $350,000+ worth of human-centered design trainings, venture acceleration courses of 9 months. During the 9 months, the startups will be able to identify, research, prototype and bring their innovation to market.

Spring Accelerator uses a Human-Centered Design (HCD) approach to gaining a deep understanding of people to design solutions for them and they take this very seriously. While talking to TechJuice about it, the team said:

“Our Human-Centered Design (HCD) approach is based on the belief that creating stuff that people want is the first rule to creating stuff at all. We believe all of the users of a system are important to design for: not just the end users of a product or service, but all the people who interact with a business – the ecosystem, stakeholders and markets surrounding your business.”

Unlike other venture accelerators in the country, Spring Accelerator has good amount of money up its sleeves. For participants selected into the program, up to $80,000 can be made available to roll out your product prototype into the market. These innovations must result in a product or service that helps girls aged 10-19 do one or more of the following:

• Help girls to stay in school or learn
• Help build skills of girls leading to economic empowerment
• Help improve the health of adolescent girls
• Earn, save or invest earnings and assets
• Feel safe and secure
• Any product or service that will improve the life of adolescent girls

Spring accelerator is sector agnostic. The team is enthusiastic about working with businesses that are serious about making a real social impact. The businesses can be a CSR initiative of a large company, a non-profit venture of a large enterprise or any self-sustaining product or service idea.