Four minutes is a splendid amount of time for a pitch. It is a less splendid amount of time for learning how to run a poultry business. At the Amani entrepreneurship competition in Goma in February 2018, ten finalists had those four minutes to present their projects. Before they faced the jury, they had received training from Kivu Entrepreneurs. The stage was the visible part. The preparation was the business.
- Training, coaching and workspace for aspiring founders and SMEs.
- Business plans and connections to financing programmes.
- A Goma base, with documented work across Congolese cities.
Consider what won. Banana-fibre packaging. Chicks for sale. A mobile service helping farmers market their harvests. Vegetables grown in Goma. These were businesses with recognisable customers and stubbornly physical problems. Their prospects depended on production, distribution and someone agreeing to pay. Entrepreneurship here had little patience for a beautifully animated slide.
01 / The money came with homework
Each of the four winners received a package worth $2,500. Only $1,350 was cash; the balance was training and equipment. That division is revealing. The organisers were budgeting for the founder’s ability to use the money as well as the money itself. A cheque might buy supplies. It cannot explain whether the selling price covers the cost of producing them.
The following year brought another version of the arrangement. Amani’s 2019 report described awards combining $1,500 for launch with $1,000 for training, followed by six months of coaching. Goma’s winners were followed by Kivu Entrepreneurs, while Bukavu’s went to Orhéol. Support had an address and a timetable. Winning was the beginning of another piece of work.
02 / A desk is part of the method
Joël Tembo Vwira founded Kivu Entrepreneurs in 2014. Based in Goma, it operates as a branch of Great Vision Business Holding. Its offer brings together an entrepreneurship academy, incubation, personalised coaching and consultancy. A prospective founder can work on an idea and a business plan; a young company can seek help with the practical difficulties of operating one.
The workspace matters to that proposition. Public descriptions list internet-connected desks, computers and meeting rooms alongside professional coaches and follow-up. It is easy to admire a network in the abstract. A desk is rather more particular: somewhere to prepare a document, meet someone and return to the same unfinished problem tomorrow.
Its expertise extends to market studies, financial projections and evaluating business projects. This places it between a classroom and a funding decision. A course can teach the vocabulary of enterprise; coaching can apply it to a particular enterprise. The distinction matters when two founders have equally enthusiastic pitches but very different costs, customers and routes to market.
KivuTech and Smart Hub Kivu also offer entrepreneurship support in the region. Kivu Entrepreneurs’ distinctive combination is visible in its academy, physical incubation and work delivering programmes for outside partners. Its business model serves entrepreneurs who subscribe to incubation and institutions that need training, research or programme implementation. Those are different customers with a shared interest in better-prepared small businesses.
03 / The room closed. The problems stayed.
In May 2020, Tembo described what happened when COVID restrictions interrupted that physical model. Activities were suspended except for a minimum visitor service. Entrepreneurs received support remotely; some employees worked from home and meetings moved to conference calls. The incubator could change how advice travelled.
“Nos activités physiques sont suspendues sauf un service minimum pour les visiteurs.”
Joël Tembo Vwira · May 2020
Physical activities suspended, with a minimum visitor service.
Its clients had less tractable problems. Tembo identified tourism, hospitality, events and trade involving outside suppliers among the affected activities. The Rwanda border closure did not directly interrupt the incubator’s work, he said, but it hurt cross-border commerce. A coach could join a call. A shipment could not join it.
That episode supplies a useful limit to the model. Advice remains useful when meetings become impossible, provided people can connect. It does not manufacture demand or reopen a trading route. Anyone copying the approach needs both a way to maintain contact and a business whose underlying transaction can still happen.
04 / Beyond the opening day
Later records show a wider footprint. In July 2023, nearly 500 young people, entrepreneurs and women in small trade attended a Bunia session organised by Kivu Entrepreneurs and Transforme with provincial support. The focus included agricultural processing and light industry. Here, business preparation was also a way to help participants approach government grant opportunities.
Its institutional work includes the Ubora Prize, overseen with I&F Entrepreneuriat. BIO’s 2023 annual report recorded 478 applications from Kinshasa, Goma and Matadi, with awards recognising business excellence and governance. One winner was Kivu Kuku, the poultry company that appeared among Amani’s winners five years earlier. The records connect two moments in its development; they do not prove what caused the progress.
In June 2025, Kivu Entrepreneurs held a conference in Kisangani. Later that year, reporting named a Kivu Entrepreneurs-Deloitte consortium in work on a cross-border trade grant mechanism in Uvira. The company’s role had room for individual founders, local networks and the administrative machinery behind support programmes.
The lesson worth borrowing is modest enough to use: put preparation into the budget, keep coaching close to the actual business, and treat a funding opportunity as a decision requiring evidence. A founder still needs customers. Kivu Entrepreneurs works on the steps that make a founder ready to meet them.