Sanghata's Frontier Market Scouts Program (FMS)
“Since its inception in 2011, FMS has continued to generate a growing community of inspired, successful, and effective social innovators, entrepreneurs and impact-driven investors.”
Sanghata’s Frontier Market Scouts (FMS) program reduces poverty by training business professionals to advance sustainable business development in low-income areas worldwide.
“The FMS training synthesizes and delivers countless years of collective experience from career social impact professionals into an intense but doable two week course. The bottom line is, if you want a job related to social impact investment and you’re serious about it, you should complete the coursework and become a Frontier Market Scout. My fellowship placement turned into my first job out of grad school working with entrepreneurs in the Middle East and North Africa, and that job is the cornerstone of my professional experience to date.”
PART ONE
During the intensive 2-week program participants are taught to balance social and financial missions for sustainable, impactful progress. They are guided through the process of scaling high-impact social enterprises, and are trained to profile ventures for impact investing and to provide seed-stage due-diligence for impact investors.
FMS training instructors are leading practitioners in the impact space and work with organizations that include Omidyar Network, Accion Venture Lab, and Unreasonable Group. Through the combination of lectures and actionable projects, participants walk away with a comprehensive understanding of who the key players in the impact sector are, how to design an innovative impact-focused business model, and what it takes to implement and scale a social venture.
PART TWO
After completing the intensive, two-week training, FMS participants have the opportunity to become candidates for fellowship positions with social ventures, accelerator programs, or impact funds. Typically full or part-time positions, fellowships are aimed at scaling or improving existing processes, addressing pressing business development or sales and marketing needs.
Since 2011, FMS fellows have worked to grow and improve processes for over 100 social enterprises around the world during field assignments based in countries such as Brazil, India, The Netherlands, Ecuador, Vietnam, Tanzania, South Africa, and Lebanon.
The 2-week training program in social enterprise management and impact investing is currently taught quarterly in the United States, in Washington D.C. and in Monterey, California. In 2017 we plan to steer the program in directions that diversify and expand its impact more effectively than ever before.