Pitch Night is a night, which provides budding entrepreneurs in Sierra Leone the opportunity to pitch their ideas or post revenue business. At pitch night entrepreneurs provide a holistic view of their business to a vibrant Sierra Leonean entrepreneur community allowing them to market their business, solicit feedback, advice and potential partnerships.
Pitch Night Purpose
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- Increase desirability and confidence in pursuing entrepreneurship.
- Provide pitch practice to entrepreneur.
- Role-model pitching and entrepreneurship to others.
- Provides stability to entrepreneurship activities.
- Provides linkages to markets, investors, partners, customers, suppliers, business support services, and capacity developers.
Significance of Freetown Pitch Night
For entrepreneurship and innovation to play the crucial role that they can in creating jobs and growing our economy, Sierra Leone needs to develop a new breed of entrepreneurs’ disruptors, value creating and high-growth entrepreneurs. This type of entrepreneurs, if they are to create significant value, jobs and ultimately economic growth, need an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem.
The Freetown Pitch Night is a crucial and perhaps the most significant part of the Networking assets of the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Sierra Leone. Networking assets are defined as community building events, skill training events, collaboration spaces, and networking of mentors, create and sustain these communities.
The social dimension, or the connections and communities, of the entrepreneurial ecosystem is critical for the growth and sustainability of the ecosystem and that networking assets, are central to this social dimension.
Entrepreneurial Ecosystems facilitate the creation of environments conducive to collaboration, synergy, networking and internationalisation. They further encourage and spur innovation. Evidence shows that domestic and foreign investors are attracted to sectors with strong entrepreneurship ecosystems, such as tech and innovation.
At the Freetown Pitch entrepreneurs have an opportunity to pitch their ideas, where they connect to mentors, advisers, investors and business development service providers. As such it is more than a night where entrepreneurs pitch their business ideas.
Freetown Pitch Night is “where ideas come to life”. It is a platform for entrepreneurs to connect, build their network and crucially demonstrate their innovative abilities.
Background
Freetown Pitch Night was initiated and started by SOBA. SOBA was a market systems development programme that aims to reduce poverty in Sierra Leone. The SOBA program ended in September of 2017, and GEN SL took the lead role in managing and organizing Freetown Pitch Night.
Disclosure
Innovation SL Ltd is the GEN SL affiliate. Together, these two entities manage all aspect of the Freetown Pitch Night. Sierra Leone Brewery (Heineken) is the main sponsor of Freetown Pitch Night through the brand Mutzig. Innovation SL covers 40% of the Freetown Pitch Night monthly budget.
