The Girl Effect Accelerator represents the first program of its kind: an international accelerator dedicated exclusively to scaling up ventures that are measurably benefiting girls in poverty. Today, less than two cents of every international development dollar goes to girls – the very people who could do most to end poverty. As long as girls remain invisible, the world misses out on a tremendous opportunity for change. We have launched this program to make girls visible to the entrepreneurial, business, and investment worlds.

The Girl Effect Accelerator launched its inaugural program in November 2014 in a location just outside of San Francisco. Throughout the program, we aligned 10 ventures with world-class mentorship, strategic financing, and access to a global network of support. The ultimate aim of the Girl Effect Accelerator is to rapidly scale up the benefit these ventures are can bring to girls in poverty. We are currently evaluating what the next version of the Girl Effect Accelerator is going to look like. We should have a public update by June 2015.

We believe wholeheartedly in the premise of the Girl Effect (watch this 2 minute video to see why). Today there are over 250 million girls living in poverty. Every year, more than $120Bn is spent in international development assistance, yet this system has yet to produce the game-changing results we all desire for girls and the world. This program is designed to bring new problem solvers to the table: entrepreneurs. The Girl Effect Accelerator will support solutions that are measurably benefiting girls in poverty: market based solutions that are locally driven, aid-independent, financially sustainable, and that have the potential to be scalable globally.

We are launching the Girl Effect Accelerator as a real-world experiment to better understand the impact that entrepreneurs, investors, and business can bring to girls in poverty. But we recognize this is a first of it’s kind venture – and as such is an experiment.

Through our research and experience, we have come to believe that startups have the potential to drive solutions into the hands of millions of girls around the world. The challenge is that while there are brilliant innovators and entrepreneurs (and many of their models are already working), to achieve greater scale they need investment, mentorship, exposure, and strategic partnerships. This is where the Girl Effect Accelerator comes in.

The term “patient capital” has become synonymous with investing across early stage ventures in emerging markets. Although important, we also believe it is critical to make “impatient capital” available to these same companies. To this end we have launched a 500k working capital fund designed to provide capital in the form of a short-term debt to the 10 ventures who participate in the Girl Effect Accelerator. It will play a crucial role in providing the participating ventures with fast acting, low-interest rate, non-collateral tied, and immediately available debt financing. Unreasonable Capital will also be committing to invest into each venture and we are hosting a private investor gathering designed to align our select companies with some of the world’s top performing investment funds and foundations.

Join us for our private investor gathering on Friday November 14. Click here for more details.

This program is a partnership between the Nike Foundation (co-founders of the Girl Effect) and Unreasonable Group. To connect directly with our team, email our program director at [email protected].

The Girl Effect is a movement. It’s about the unique potential of adolescent girls to end poverty for themselves and the world. It’s about getting girls on to the global development stage and driving massive resources to them.
Created by the Nike Foundation, in collaboration with the NoVo Foundation, United Nations Foundation and Coalition for Adolescent Girls, the Girl Effect is driven by hundreds of thousands of supporters who believe in the potential of 250 million adolescent girls living in poverty. The Girl Effect launched in 2008 with a film that caught the imagination of the world(watch it here).

Unreasonable Group is a portfolio of companies, funds, and experiments. Each entity under the group is designed to leverage entrepreneurship and investment to solve our most difficult and meaningful problem-sets.
To date, Unreasonable has launched a small portfolio of companies: Unreasonable Capital, UNREASONALBE.is, Unreasonable Media, and Unreasonable at Sea in addition to working closely with their sister organizations at the Unreasonable Institute, Unreasonable East Africa, and Unreasonable Mexico. The Girl Effect Accelerator is a perfect embodiment of the type of partnership Unreasonable Group is eager to launch, operate, and learn from.

We believe that when it comes to changing the lives of girls in poverty, impatience is a virtue. The first day of the program will be October 31, 2014. The program will then run through November 16 with a culminating event and an investor gathering on November 11 and 12. (Click on these links to read about the details of the Investor Gathering and the Culminating event)