Author
Nic Lauten
Kula Project
Biography
Nic Lauten is the Executive Director of Kula Project, a nonprofit organization working to grow prosperity with smallholder coffee farmers. His 18-year career has focused on economic development in East Africa, previously working in job creation and entrepreneurship in rural northern Uganda before joining Kula in 2017. Since 2018, Kula’s Fellowship has worked with over 2700 farmers. Through an approach focused on increasing coffee harvests and diversifying revenue, graduates on average triple their income within 1 year. Nic holds a bachelor’s degree from Vanguard University of Southern California.
Reframing the Narrative
The dominant narrative of entrepreneurship in the twenty-first century has been shaped to an outsized degree by the mythology of disruption, scale, and unicorn valuations. However, this conceptualization too easily ignores a fundamental reality: for hundreds of millions of people worldwide, entrepreneurship represents not a path to billion-dollar valuations but rather the primary vehicle for moving from survival to sustenance, from poverty to prosperity. Entrepreneurship is a deeply contextual practice shaped by inequality, identity, cultural norms, and access to resources. By examining entrepreneurial barriers and grassroots initiatives around the globe, especially in rural and lower-income regions, we can begin to reconstruct frameworks to prioritize wider inclusivity and truly transform local communities.
Necessity-driven entrepreneurship
Individuals often turn to entrepreneurship not from opportunity but from necessity. When formal employment is scarce, traditional financial systems are inaccessible to rural populations, and structural inequalities limit pathways to economic stability, entrepreneurship becomes less a choice and more an imperative for survival. This reality is particularly acute among smallholder farmers, who constitute a significant portion of the world’s extreme poor. More than 800 million people live in extreme poverty (i.e., live on less than $3 per day, as defined by the World Bank), with the majority being farmers.[i]
Organizations such as Kula Project have been developed to address this challenge, and by doing so, work deeply within this entrepreneurial landscape. Operating at the intersection of economic development, environmental sustainability, and gender equality, Kula works with Rwanda’s smallholder coffee farmers through a comprehensive fellowship program combining regenerative agriculture training with entrepreneurial development and business coaching.[ii] Their model recognizes a crucial reality: in many of Africa’s more densely populated countries, land scarcity and climate uncertainties mean prosperity cannot be quickly achieved through increased farm production alone. To build resilience and a sustainable path of progress, households must diversify their income through multiple revenue streams; this might be termed “necessity-driven entrepreneurship.”
Entrepreneurship language and perception
One of the most significant barriers to fostering entrepreneurship in resource-constrained communities is a fundamental disconnect between how entrepreneurship is conceptualized and what feels achievable to potential entrepreneurs. In rural Rwanda, the image of the entrepreneur has often been shaped by distant examples of established businesspeople operating in urban hubs—individuals who seem worlds apart from the daily reality of smallholder farmers.
Kula Project’s experience reveals the importance of linguistic and conceptual reframing in democratizing entrepreneurship. Initially, program participants expressed reluctance about becoming entrepreneurs, feeling that such an identity was beyond their reach. Through iterative program development, Kula Project’s team began using the local Kinyarwanda word ubushabitsi rather than the formal term for business. Ubushabitsi translates more closely to “side hustle,” a term that carries connotations of accessibility and achievability rather than the intimidating formality of “business.”
This linguistic shift reflects a fundamental reconceptualization of entrepreneurship that acknowledges the incremental, adaptive, and often informal nature of economic activity in the context of poverty. Everyone can create and grow side hustles by identifying needs or opportunities within their immediate community, accessing modest capital (in Kula’s case, farmers are accessing loans often starting around $150 at 3–4 percent interest), and launching initiatives to generate additional income. This reframing asserts that entrepreneurial capacity is universal, even if the resources and ecosystems to support it are not.
Localized entrepreneurship: Barriers and drivers of success
When entrepreneurship is understood through this inclusive lens, a remarkable diversity of innovation emerges. Within Kula’s Fellowship cohorts, participants have launched a myriad of ventures alongside their growing coffee farms, including barber shops, carpentry, grain milling, bakeries, animal rearing, vegetable farming, tailoring, soap making, beekeeping, and restaurants. These enterprises represent simple yet essential innovation: the application of available resources to address unmet needs within proximate-specific contexts.
The most innovative solutions often emerge from real-world constraints and the intimate knowledge of those living within those constraints. These community-rooted models often remain unrecognized or unsupported because they do not conform to traditional investor expectations or high-growth metrics, yet they yield outsized social benefits within the communities they serve. At their core, they propel their founders out of poverty, which is often the primary objective.
However, even the most promising grassroots innovations struggle to thrive without ecosystems providing affordable financing, relevant education, and community support. Institutional financing remains largely out of reach for rural smallholder farmers due to physical distance to bank branches, lack of digital banking adoption, and prohibitively high interest rates (often starting at around 16 percent). These challenges are often magnified for women by social stigma and family dynamics that prohibit independent financial decision-making. Aside from the lack of finance, there is often the reality that entrepreneurship is not the norm—without community examples of people having started businesses successfully, or a vision different from the status quo, many farmers remain in a day-to-day survival mindset.
Kula Project has seen success in addressing these gaps through its Household Entrepreneurship Curriculum, business coaching, and the facilitation of village savings and loans associations (VSLAs), which are self-governed groups in which members save regularly and borrow at low interest rates. Through the curriculum and personal coaching, farmers (together with heads of households) create household visions and action plans and, with the consistent, personalized support of business coaches, develop, test, and launch feasible business plans. While requiring intentional investment, the key elements are simple: a clear, contextualized curriculum; focused, personal support from a trusted community member; and flexible, accessible financing.
The results of community-centered entrepreneurial models challenge conventional metrics of success. Within 1 year after graduating from Kula’s Fellowship, the participants experience, on average, a 203% increase in income and develop an average of 2.4 revenue streams per household.[iii] Yet these statistics only begin to capture the transformation occurring: enhanced agency and decision-making capacity, particularly for women; increased food security; environmental benefits through regenerative agriculture; improved educational opportunities for children; and strengthened community networks.
This suggests that policy frameworks must shift away from purely market-oriented models toward approaches that value social impact, inclusivity, and collective ownership alongside financial returns. When entrepreneurship is evaluated solely through the lens of scale and return on investment, most of the world’s entrepreneurial activity—and its power to move households out of poverty—remain ignored.
Global approaches and policy recommendations
Evidence from grassroots entrepreneurship models suggests several critical policy interventions necessary to cultivate entrepreneurship from communities to the global level. First, governments and international development organizations must restructure financial systems to ensure realistic capital accessibility for rural populations. This requires establishing and supporting community-based financial institutions, such as VSLAs, providing low-interest loan programs specifically designed for necessity-driven entrepreneurs, and removing regulatory barriers that prevent informal entrepreneurs from accessing formal financial services.
Entrepreneurship policy models should mature to drive not only top-down GDP-focused growth but also bottom-up local community development. Entrepreneurship is perhaps the most powerful method for rural communities to grow, rather than waiting for the eventual ripple effects of urban growth.
These frameworks should prioritize local organizations that possess intimate knowledge of community needs, constraints, and opportunities. This includes investing in localized business coaching, peer-to-peer learning networks within and between communities, and building entrepreneurship curricula that meld localized learnings with global practices, emphasizing that the vast majority of successful ventures will serve a hyper-local market—and that too, is success.
Governments must expand the definition of entrepreneurial success in policy evaluation metrics. Rather than focusing exclusively on job creation numbers, tax revenue, or GDP contributions, policies should incorporate measures of household income diversification, gender equality, environmental sustainability, and community resilience. This broader framework would make visible the contributions of necessity-driven entrepreneurs and justify continued investment in their support.
Grassroots entrepreneurship opportunities—far too great to ignore
Cultivating entrepreneurship from communities to the global level requires a fundamental reconceptualization of what entrepreneurship is, who entrepreneurs are, and what constitutes entrepreneurial success. The dominant narrative cannot serve as a universal template for entrepreneurial development. Globally, particularly in rural and low-income communities, entrepreneurship is necessity driven rather than opportunity driven, focused on incremental diversification rather than exponential scale, and measured by human flourishing rather than solely financial metrics.
Recognizing and supporting this alternative entrepreneurship requires structural changes at multiple levels. Financial systems must provide accessible, affordable capital to those currently excluded. Educational approaches must be contextualized and responsive. Policy frameworks must value household-level growth alongside larger economic returns. The concept of entrepreneurship itself must remain democratized, challenged from any isolated association with elite education and privileged networks, and continually defined as a universal drive to identify opportunities and create economic value within one’s context. When entrepreneurship is truly inclusive, it becomes not merely an economic strategy but also a pathway to dignity, resilience, and shared prosperity. For hundreds of millions of people, the vision of entrepreneurship is not building a huge valuation but rather a side hustle, a diversified income stream, and a path from subsistence to stability. In areas where opportunities seem limited, the potential is endless. The global community must invest in these opportunities and include them in a broad understanding of entrepreneurship, as they are essential to economic development around the world.
[i] Jonas Helth Lønborg et al., “September 2025 global poverty update from the World Bank: New data and regional classifications,” World Bank Blogs, September 30, 2025, https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/opendata/september-2025-global-poverty-update-from-the-world-bank–new-da.
[ii] “Impact,” Kula Project Impact, Accessed October 25, 2025, www.kulaproject.org/impact.
[iii] “Impact,” Kula Project Impact.
Global Innovation Reimagined
Global Innovation Reimagined showcases reflections and research on innovation in its many forms across Asia, North America, and Europe. The perspectives offered herein draw from discussions during the trilateral Reimagining Entrepreneurship and Innovation conference, hosted by CAPRI, CAPRI USA, the University of Virginia, and Copenhagen Business School from July 22 to 25, 2025.
