Progress, gaps, and what we’re doing about them in each of the programs currently under way.
Over the past few weeks this blog has mostly told stories: a supporter who got sent home from an airport, alumni who volunteered to mentor, a consultant who kept helping after it was clear she wouldn’t take us on. This week we want to do something more ordinary, which is to tell you where the work actually stands.
Starting something new is usually the exciting part. A founder enrolls, meets peers, opens the app, and works through a first module while the idea still feels close at hand. Then classes, exams, customers, family responsibilities, and the daily work of keeping a business going all start competing for the same hours. That stretch is playing out in every program we run right now. Some of the reasons people slow down have to do with their circumstances. Others have to do with how we’ve designed and supported the experience, and those are ours to fix.
This update draws on our most recent program progress reports, which cover every group of founders and students we’re working with right now: more than 100 people across two partner pilots, the FRP-03 cohort of the Foundation Readiness Program, and our current cohort of Student Ambassadors. Some of what they show is encouraging. Some of it isn’t, and we’d rather you hear about both from us.
Jacaranda Care Foundation: Confidence Ahead of Understanding
The Youth Entrepreneurship Readiness Pilot with Jacaranda Care Foundation is three weeks into its 12-week run, and the cohort now stands at 20 young people. All 20 have an Arise account.
The biggest change came in a single week. On October 3, six participants had started a module. By October 9, seventeen had. Over the same stretch the cohort completed 52 modules, bringing the total to 71, and two participants have already finished all nine modules across the three courses. Most of the work so far is still in the first course, on entrepreneurial mindset, which is where the pilot’s schedule says it should be until October 15.
Three participants haven’t started yet. One is registered but not yet enrolled in the first course, and two are enrolled without having opened a module. Jacaranda’s facilitators are following up with each of them, starting with access, since that is usually the simplest thing to fix.
The baseline survey, which 19 of the 20 completed, turned up something we’ll be watching over the next nine weeks. Asked to rate themselves from 1 to 5, participants put their confidence in making a business idea real at 4.0 on average, but their understanding of entrepreneurship at 2.7. The ambition is clearly there, and the frameworks and practical knowledge are less developed so far. That isn’t a problem in itself. It is the gap a readiness program exists to close, and the aim is to put evidence and skill underneath that confidence, not to talk anyone out of it.
One early quiz result points the same way, though it rests on a small number of people. Problem Framing, the module that asks participants to state precisely what problem they’re solving and for whom, has the lowest quiz average in the pilot so far, at 2.9 out of 5, but only seven participants have taken it. The real question for the second and third courses is whether participants can turn their confidence into a sharper, evidence-based understanding of the problems they want to solve. The end-of-pilot survey will tell us how far they got.
When asked where they needed the most help, 16 of 19 respondents named access to resources, and 12 named business knowledge and frameworks.
Church Life Africa: Strong Feedback, Unfinished Work
Our pilot with Church Life Africa has been on the Arise platform since mid-July, and its close-out survey began coming in on October 10.
Half of the 36 participants, 18 people, have now completed all nine Tier 1 modules. Two more finished in the past week. The memorandum of understanding set a target of 60%, which means the pilot is four finishers short of it. Thirty-four of the 36 have completed at least one module, so nearly everyone began. The difficulty has been in carrying on: twelve participants are below the cohort’s average progress, six of them have completed only one module, and that group hasn’t changed in a week. Two participants have access to the platform but haven’t started.
The close-out survey results are strong, with one caveat worth stating plainly. Sixteen of the 36 participants responded. All sixteen said the program’s goal had been achieved for them, eight fully and eight partially, and all sixteen said they now have a defined or refined venture concept. Their average confidence in executing a business idea was 4.56 out of 5, they rated the program 4.63 out of 5 overall, and fifteen of the sixteen said they want to continue to Tier 2. Those are encouraging numbers. They also come from fewer than half of the cohort, and the people who answer a close-out survey are often the people who stayed most engaged. Strong ratings from those who replied tell us a good deal about their experience, but they don’t tell us whether the cohort as a whole reached its goals. We are still asking the other twenty to respond, and we especially want to hear from participants who drifted away or found the program wasn’t what they expected. Their answers are the ones most likely to show us what to change.
FRP-03: Six Founders Up Close, and a Harder Picture Across the Cohort
Last month we wrote about the FRP-03 founders who earned their way into Tier 2. This week we look at that cohort from different distances. A bi-weekly checkpoint follows six founders closely. A new weekly report, starting this week, follows a wider group of 42 candidates. FRP-03 has roughly 120 confirmed candidates in all, and the weekly report doesn’t yet cover all of them, so its figures below describe those 42 only.
All six have completed the full Validate stage. Three have moved into Build content, and the furthest along has worked through six of the nine Build modules, narrowing his first customer and sizing his market. Another has begun sizing his market after defining his offering, and a third came back to the platform just hours before the checkpoint and is working on describing his offering.
Across all six, the checkpoint found the same strength and the same gap. Every founder has specific, credible customer-discovery evidence from talking to real people. None has yet completed the module on identifying the alternatives their customers already use. That is the work in front of the whole group before the next checkpoint.
The wider report is harder reading. Of the 42 candidates on it, ten have completed all nine Validate modules, three have started Build, and none has finished Build yet. Seven of the ten who finished Validate haven’t opened Build, and several of them haven’t been active on the platform in more than three months. Another ten made some progress through Validate and then stopped for three weeks or longer. Twenty, nearly half the list, have no recorded module completions at all. In the week before the report, five of the 42 were active.
We’ve set ourselves a goal of moving at least 15 FRP-03 founders into the program’s third stage by December 20. On the evidence in this report we are off track. No one has completed the stage that comes before it yet, and reaching 15 in ten weeks would take a pace this cohort hasn’t come close to so far. We’d rather say that now than in December. The most direct help we can give is to the seven founders who finished Validate and haven’t started Build, since they are the closest to moving forward. We’re also contacting the twenty who haven’t started, to find out whether something is in their way and whether each of them still intends to take part.
Campus Ambassadors: Learning Up, Check-Ins Down
Our second cohort of Student Ambassadors in the Arise Campus Chapter program now has seven students being tracked. Their average progress through the nine-module curriculum rose from 54% on October 2 to 68% on October 11, driven mainly by two ambassadors who made large jumps in the past week. One ambassador has completed all nine modules. Asked how likely they were to recommend the program, the seven gave it an average of 8.3 out of 10.
The accountability side is weaker than the learning side. Each ambassador is meant to meet their FRP Alumni mentor every two weeks and file a checkpoint. In the most recent checkpoints, four of seven confirmed their last one-on-one took place. Two reported missing it, and a third marked it as held while noting in the comments that it hadn’t happened. Three ambassadors who are active in the app haven’t filed a checkpoint in more than three weeks.
We’re following up on the missed meetings. We also need to ask whether the two-week rhythm, the expectations on each side, and the support around those meetings are working for the students and for the FRP Alumni mentors who volunteer their time. That’s a question to work out with the mentors, not one to settle with reminders to file.
Ambassadors are also asked to introduce the Arise app to other students. So far they’ve introduced it to 23 students, eight of whom installed it and two of whom started learning. Most of the drop happens between installing the app and opening a first module, which suggests the path from hearing about Arise to actually using it needs to be simpler. That is where we’re focusing our attention with the ambassadors.
What the Reports Have in Common
Read side by side, the reports describe a similar pattern. In the two partner pilots and the Campus cohort, nearly everyone has an account and most have begun. Finishing is harder, and it is where the numbers fall short of what we planned. FRP-03 is weaker at the starting end as well, with nearly half the candidates on the new weekly list yet to record a single module. Our last FRP-03 update showed that readiness at screening got people through the door but didn’t carry them through the program, and this week’s reports suggest that holds across our programs.
That changes how we read our own numbers. An account, an enrollment, or a first module is a real step, but it doesn’t tell us whether someone is learning, testing a problem against real customers, or building something that will last. Those are the outcomes we care about, and they take longer to show up.
It also means a stalled participant has to be understood before anyone draws conclusions. A good share of what’s getting in the way this month is more mundane than motivation: an enrollment code that was never redeemed, a check-in that slipped, an app that was installed but never opened. Other cases will turn out to be exams, a demanding season in the business, or a genuine change of mind, and each of those calls for a different response.
The programs have to adapt as well. We ask founders to test their assumptions against evidence and change course when the evidence says so, and the same applies to how we deliver these programs, especially access, mentorship, follow-up, and the move from one stage to the next.
Over the next two weeks, our facilitators and partners will be working on the access problems, the missed mentor meetings, and the outreach to participants who have gone quiet. We’ll report back on what changed and what still needs work.
Your Turn
If you’ve been following these programs from a distance, there are three ways you can help right now.
The first is expertise. One Tier 2 founder has a finished product design and needs a manufacturing or production contact, and several others are about to begin competitor research and would benefit from someone who knows their industry.
The second is helping a student take a first step. If you know a university student who would benefit from learning how to test a business idea, point them to https://bit.ly/Arise2100, where applications for the November cohort of Student Ambassadors are open.
The third is your own experience. If you’ve been through an entrepreneurship program, what kept you going after the first few weeks, once the novelty wore off? Was it a mentor, a peer, a deadline, a conversation with a customer, or something else? That is the stretch where we’re losing people, and your answer could help shape the path for the next founder or student who joins.
For any of these, write to us at he***@********00.org.
If you’re an FRP-03 candidate who started and then stepped away, we’d like to hear from you too, at the same address. Tell us what got in the way. It’s the most useful information we can get right now, and there’s no penalty for having paused.
We share updates like this one because the work is more likely to improve when the people around it can see what’s happening. Thank you to everyone in these programs who has trusted us with their time and their ideas. And if you’d like to support the work financially, our fundraising campaign runs through March 2027, and the same address will reach us.
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