Incubator Tool Library

A collection of vetted tools and resources to help impact incubators run smarter, scale bigger, and better support their entrepreneurs.

Pollinate Impact Tool Library

Welcome to your shortcut to the good stuff.

When we say “tool”, we mean anything that helps incubators thrive—software, templates, handbooks, or any resource that lets you level up your game. We’ve curated the best for impact incubators across the Global South, so skip the search, grab what you need, and get back to making magic happen. 

Share your tool! If you have a tool, template, or resource that others could benefit from, submit it for review. 

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The Hub Specialization Playbook

This playbook covers the ten success factors to consider in your specialisation strategy.

Organization: GIZ Make-IT in Africa

Mentoring Assessment Tools

Receive personalised feedback and clear recommendations on your assessment, as a mentor, mentee or mentoring program managers

Organization: The Human Edge

Make the Most of Mentoring

Whether you’re actively seeking a new mentor or simply curious about the benefits of mentoring, our “Make the Most of Mentoring” course will equip you with the tools and strategies needed to succeed.

Organization: The Human Edge

Tips for Sourcing a Diverse Accelerator

Vilcap and IBM share the intentionally inclusive process of reaching founders outside their traditional networks, and using an inclusive and equitable diligence process in their cohorts. Here’s what we did differently – and what any decision-maker in tech: any investor, accelerator leader or corporation, can do to reduce implicit bias when they’re working with early-stage entrepreneurs.

Organization: Vilcap & IBM

Creating an Impact Investment Ask

Diagnose a venture’s business growth readiness using a structured seven-element framework

Build a four-step impact management process aligned with investor expectations

Integrate business and impact insights to craft a compelling and credible investment ask

Communicate investment needs in a way that aligns with both financial and impact goals

Organization: CASE

Impact Investment Finance

What are impact investors looking for? This course offers a practical introduction to the impact investing marketplace. You’ll learn how the market is structured, including the roles of asset owners and asset managers, and how capital flows between them. The course explores how impact investors pursue both financial and social or environmental returns, and the different types of investors involved along with their motivations, constraints, and preferred investment vehicles.

Organization: CASE

Tools & Strategies | Identifying & Qualifying Deeply Aligned Funders

Explore tips on how to shape funder research priorities and criteria to assess funder fit and uncover the information your organization needs to support this step in the fundraising process.

Organization: Black Fox Global

Actionable Strategies for Engaging your Board

Organization: Black Fox Global

Grant Ready Communications

Tried and true strategies to ensure your organization is ‘grant ready’ when you do secure invitations to submit proposals and letters of inquiry (LOIs).

Organization: Black Fox Global

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Impact-OS (Powered by Impact Amplifier)

Impact-OS (IOS) helps organisations create digital accelerator programmes in Africa.

IOS provides technology to investors, Enterprise Support Organisations (ESOs), and accelerators to setup, white label and manage scalable online programmes to entrepreneurs, particularly focused on grant and investment readiness.

Organization: Impact Amplifier

What Ugandan ESOs Can Teach the World

What’s working in entrepreneur support in Uganda?

“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts” is a phrase associated with the principles behind entrepreneurship ecosystem development. When ecosystem actors collaborate, the value they create by working together is larger than if they work independently. This certainly rings true with what we’ve experienced working with more than 170 fellow Entrepreneur Support Organisations (ESOs) from 40 countries since 2015.

Sub-Saharan Africa is a hub for innovation. The continent has the highest rate of entrepreneurship globally, partly because of its young and digitally literate population. The support provided by tech hubs, incubators, and accelerators is invaluable. Depending on which resources you reference, Africa has somewhere between 600 to 1300 of these organisations across the continent and they provide the contextualised support that African entrepreneurs need to grow and
scale.

This report shares key insights drawn from the Ugandan ecosystem and a practical set of exercises developed in close collaboration with ESO leaders who have tried and tested building out their organisations’ financial, impact, and operational viability.

Organization: Village Capital

Unlocking Pipeline Africa. A Playbook for Entrepreneur Support in Africa

The Unlocking Pipeline Playbook compiles lessons, case studies, and trends gathered from our pioneering Village Capital’s Communities Africa program, which brought together leading African entrepreneur ecosystem builders to share best practices.

Organization: Village Capital

SMARTER SYSTEMS: How Tweaking Your Diligence Process Can Unlock Overlooked opportunities ACCELERATOR IMPLEMENTATION GUIDE

We found that there are discrepancies in how investors evaluate men-led and women-led
startups, potentially leading them to overlook promising startups and overestimate less
promising startups. This implementation guide outlines three steps we found that accelerators can incorporate into their selection processes to consistently evaluate all startups more accurately.

Organization: Village Capital

Capital Explorer

The objective of Capital Explorer is to equip and support entrepreneurs in exploring which funding options may be a good fit for their business and help them identify capital providers offering those options.

Organization: Village Capital

Product improvement tool

Use behavioral science principles to share user insights

Organization: Maha Accelerator

SCALE Framework

Small and growing businesses (SGBs) profoundly impact economies and
livelihoods, particularly in emerging markets. A growing body of evidence demonstrates that enterprise support organizations (ESOs) create jobs and increase the productivity of SGBs.
However, the impact of ESO programs varies considerably.

In 2013, Argidius set out to identify what works best in BDS to enable SGBs to
grow and create employment. In doing so, they drew not only from their own
portfolio but also from extensive academic literature and the experience of
outside programs.Five fundamental considerations emerged that distinguished high-performing Enterprise Support programs (those that cost-effectively delivered SGB growth). These five considerations have been codified as SCALE.

Organization: Argidius Foundation

Enable

Making entrepreneur support affordable through the Enable platform. A platform that equips ESOs to provide targeted and personalized support to hundreds of MSMEs simultaneously.

Organization: ONOW

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