Four programs are moving at once right now, each at a different stage of development. They look different on the surface — a faith-based cohort in Nigeria, a tech venture pilot, a campus ambassador program, a foundation-readiness curriculum — but underneath, they’re all running into the same question: what actually helps someone move from a good intention to sustained action. Here’s what we’re seeing.
Church Life Africa
The Church Life Africa pilot launched in Nigeria on July 13. The original plan was to pair participants into accountability partnerships live in that first session, but time didn’t allow for it. What happened instead: each participant introduced themselves to the full group, sharing their venture idea and how they hoped the program would help them get there. That ended up serving its own purpose — building awareness of who else was in the cohort, fostering camaraderie, and setting the stage for the networking that would follow. The formal accountability pairing and goal-setting exercise — each person stating a goal, their “why,” and a specific next step — happened afterward, completed within the first week.
That structure seems to be paying off. All 36 participants in the official cohort are screened and onboarded, and by our most recent checkpoint, 88.9% had logged into the platform and course completion had nearly doubled week over week, from 30.6% to 52.8%. That said, four participants still haven’t accessed the platform at all, and facilitators are following up with each of them directly — a strong start doesn’t mean everyone moves at the same pace, and we’d rather say so than not. CLA’s annual convention has us on a two-week pause now; we’ll reconvene for the next bi-weekly group session on August 10.
Tech Venture Builder
The Tech Venture Builder pilot with LM Tech Hub is heading into the final stretch of its 13-week program, with hackathon presentations set for August 14. The cohort has been working across a wide spread of specialties — data analysis, product design, cybersecurity, AI automation, software development — and the participants who’ve already completed every module are now serving as peer champions, helping pull the rest of the cohort across the finish line before the hackathon.
Ahead of that, the cohort ran a Customer Insight Exchange to test what founders had actually learned from talking to customers, rather than assuming they knew. Seventeen participants shared a completed customer persona, and pooling them surfaced patterns no single founder would have caught alone: the ventures cluster around five customer types — professionals and businesses, health and care recipients, everyday consumers, digital users, and a handful still working out exactly who they’re building for — with pain points repeating across ventures, from time scarcity to unreliable providers to disorganized communication and records. One pattern stood out: most of these customers already have a workaround today, usually WhatsApp, paper notes, or a local market, and that workaround is what each venture actually has to out-perform, not some other app.
It’s also worth reporting that roughly half the personas shared described a different customer than the same founder had described in an earlier module — a sign that some of this is still hypothesis rather than confirmed fact. The assignment before showcase is to close that gap with at least one more real customer conversation. That’s really the point of the exercise: not to confirm what founders already believed, but to replace assumption with evidence before they build any further.
Separately, for anyone interested in the venture-builder model, LM Tech Hub is currently recruiting for its next cohort and has a Cohort 7 Taster Day event on August 4th. You can find additional information about the program and explore available courses here: https://lmtechub.org/all-courses/
Foundation Readiness Program
FRP-03 has spent the last few weeks doing the unglamorous work that makes a venture idea real. At a mid-July checkpoint, the cohort worked through problem validation: the discipline of confirming a problem is genuinely felt before building anything to solve it. Angela’s idea for modest, period-reliable underwear started from her own frustration — the exercise pushed her to go ask other women whether they felt the same, rather than assume it. Nsisuk worked through the same discipline for a telehealth concept aimed at rural patients, landing on a problem statement that named the pain (long travel distances, cost, a shortage of nearby clinicians) without once mentioning the app that might eventually solve it. That’s deliberate — a good problem statement describes the pain, not the fix.
Then, at the request of the cohort candidates themselves, we followed that up with a goal-setting refresher at last Saturday’s group learning checkpoint. The two sessions build on each other: once you’re confident the problem is real, the next failure point is usually not having a clear goal to hold onto when the program gets hard. We’ve seen this in the data — the participants most likely to fall off tend to be the ones who never set a concrete goal for what they wanted out of the program in the first place. Without a clear goal, the first setback often feels like the end of the journey instead of part of it.
Arise Campus Chapter Program
One thing the pilot made clear: ambassadors who had someone actually checking in on them were far more likely to keep going. That’s the thinking behind how we’re carrying the pilot Student Ambassador program forward into Cohort 2 of the Arise Campus Chapter Program. Nine FRP alumni mentors are confirmed across Kenya, Nigeria, and Ghana, every one of them having signed on to the full set of expectations, and the pool is sized to support somewhere between 48 and 70 ambassadors. Each mentor stays engaged from the moment an ambassador is confirmed through the full 12 weeks — countersigning goals, running a 15-to-20-minute goal-setting conversation before Week 1, then a bi-weekly rhythm of 1:1s and group checkpoints, backed by an always-on WhatsApp line for anything that comes up in between.
The plan is to deepen our presence at the universities where the pilot ambassadors already proved the model, while adding 4–6 new universities — and to get there through community and grassroots networks rather than paid advertising. It’s the harder path, and it shows: we’ve welcomed a handful of new ambassadors so far, but not the volume of applicants we’d hoped for. Rather than extend the recruiting window and wait, we’re exploring a shift to rolling onboarding — bringing ambassadors in as they’re ready instead of holding to a fixed cohort start date. The mentor structure holds either way, which is really the goal: ambassadors who’ve genuinely shifted their mindset and taken action on their own goals, with student reach and institutional presence following as the result, not the starting metric.
Looking across all four of these, the same pattern keeps showing up. In each case, the thing we changed wasn’t the content — it was the structure around it: an accountability partner assigned within the first week, a shared customer-discovery exercise before the hackathon, a goal-setting session requested by the cohort itself, a mentor assigned before week one. None of that guarantees anyone finishes. But it’s where we’re putting our attention right now, and we’ll keep reporting honestly on what it does and doesn’t move.
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