Our Impact

Luxembourg is home to the largest investment fund centre in Europe, yet an OECD report found that its 18 to 29 year olds are among the least financially trained. Lise Mouschang (a graduate of both LSE and the University of Oxford) and our CEO, Caroline Varin sought to change that by giving 20 young people aged 16 to 22 living in Luxembourg the chance to learn the fundamentals of personal finance. Going beyond money management, the young people were able to learn about investing from the people who do it for a living, and then practised with a simulated €100,000 portfolio.

We deliberately recruited young women and young people from migrant and less advantaged backgrounds. The bootcamp aims to build their economic independence and open doors to rooms traditionally closed to them.

Professionals from CaixaBank Asset Management, White & Case and Nordic Capital taught three training days across three weekends, hosting the sessions in their own offices and teaching their own specialisms. Topics included asset classes, ETFs, responsible investments, credit and borrowing, budgeting and how to use AI as a personal finance assistant.

Then each participant was paired with a professional from one of the partner institutions for two months of individual mentoring as the young people were coached as they managed a simulated €100,000 portfolio on the Virtual Stock Exchange platform, using live market data.

The bootcamp closed with a final event, where the students presented their experience and those with the strongest portfolios received prizes. The winning portfolios were marked by four professionals using a 100-point rubric.

Our first week was spent with Nhloso Likusasa Le’lichakazile (NLL), where volunteer professors Dr Kassim Kalinaki and Mpumalanga Zwane delivered AI Skills for Employability to young jobseekers and persons with disabilities. With laptops open, the jobseekers learnt a simple recipe for prompting AI tools (role, task, context, format and limits) and put it straight to work: analysing job adverts, rebuilding their CVs for applicant tracking systems, drafting tailored cover letters and improving their LinkedIn profiles.

For the second group, learners with disabilities, Dr Kalinaki designed his sessions around everyday digital skills. He covered basic smartphone use, spotting online scams with a “Stop. Think. Check.” approach and protecting personal information. Participants then put their phones to work for their small businesses, photographing products, advertising on WhatsApp Status and responding professionally to customer enquiries. Alongside the digital training, Mpumalanga Zwane led sessions on mental health and wellbeing, with participants journaling, exploring healthy habits and reflecting on what makes them proud.

The following week, our work continued with the Woman Farmer Foundation (WFF) at Riders Ranch in Sidvokodvo, where volunteer professor Witness Dlamini spent four days with young women farmers, rural youth and emerging agripreneurs.

Much of the learning happened in the field. Working in groups, participants prepared Bokashi compost from start to finish, learning why each ingredient matters, and dug fertility trench beds that help soil hold water for longer and release nutrients over time. They also mixed a natural pest spray from garlic and chilli, using ingredients most households already have.

Back in the classroom, the focus turned to business. Witness took participants through farm budgeting and design thinking, testing every idea against whether people want it, whether it can be done with the resources available and whether it can pay its way, before moving from prototype to minimum viable product. Teams drafted grant proposals against real climate finance opportunities and presented them for feedback, and a session on renewable energy explored the potential of biogas.

This year we returned to Kagadi in western Uganda to work with African Rural University (ARU), a women’s university that trains rural transformation specialists. From 24 August to 4 September, our two educators led courses requested by ARU, open to faculty and students.

Hannah Bamwerinde’s tourism course took entrepreneurship on directly. She asked participants what their communities already have and what they could make of it, and each group had 30 minutes to build a tourism idea. One imagined an eco-grill built around the local flavours of Ruteete. Another saw the Green Belt as a place for trekking, honey, fruit and medicinal herbs. A third proposed a Coffee and Fish Integrated Tourism Centre, combining coffee tasting, fish farming and fishing. The groups then used AI tools to turn their sketches into pitches and demo websites, and learnt to check the facts before publishing anything.

Dr Angelo Salasini, who travelled from Zambia, came at it through farming, asking what happens when AI meets the knowledge farmers already hold. His sessions filled up as the days went on. Participants shared indigenous practices for choosing crops, managing disease and keeping soil fertile. Some argued that traditional knowledge protects quality while modern methods chase quantity. The group concluded that the two can sit side by side, with new tools building on what communities already know. Angelo linked this to Ubuntu, the southern African idea often translated as “I am because we are”, and to farming communities that leave no one behind.

Participants then put the ideas into practice in ARU’s garden, scanning the soil with their phones using an AI app called Intelligent Soil, which read nutrient levels and organic matter, and working vermicompost into the beds. AI became a tool you hold in one hand while the other holds the compost. ARU’s Vice-Chancellor, Dr Mwalimu Musheshe, joined several sessions and presented with Angelo on AI, local knowledge and food security. The programme closed on 4 September with group presentations, traditional dance and a shared meal prepared by the students.

Over 600 learners joined us for the fourth Entrepreneurship Bootcamp, which ran online from 14 to 25 September 2026. Across six live sessions on design thinking, business models and finance, then branding and pitching, they learnt the skills needed to build a business proposal for funders. We designed the bootcamp for learners building small and medium-sized businesses in low- and middle-income countries.

This year we added recordings, extra videos, readings and assignments in our online classroom, and for those building social or sustainable businesses a guest talk from Gabriel Ng (Investment Director, Better Society Capital) on what impact investors look for in a social enterprise. Learners told us they now start from the customer’s problem, plan their cash month by month and pitch with more confidence.

Learners submitted over 100 pitches. Of those, 22 learners went on to pitch live, and 10 reached the Dragons’ Den final on 25 September with ideas in agriculture, sustainability, software and more. We were impressed by how many learners put forward social enterprises and ideas built around sustainability.

Ford Credit Europe has supported the bootcamp since its first edition as part of Ford’s Global Caring Month, when Ford employees around the world volunteer their time. This year Ford also gave us an extra set of judges for the practice round: Irene Bravo, Matt Hunt and Suzanne Lewsley. Matt Armbruster, Kerry Henderson, Carmen Nieto and Simon Weedon judged the final. We would like to thank all of our supporters for their time and feedback, which makes a real difference to our learners.

The Women in Higher Education (WiHE) Fellowship brought together a global cohort of twenty women for professional development, networking, mentoring, and peer exchange. Fellows ranging from PhD researchers and teaching faculty to administrators and early-to-mid-career professionals gathered for a ten-month online experience. Hosted by Dr Julia Sargent (UK) and Dr Ilka Kostka (USA), and supported by Professors Without Borders under the leadership of Dr Caroline Varin, the Fellowship was designed to celebrate and give voice to women in higher education while addressing the real and recurring challenges they face.

Offered at no cost, the programme also aimed to make mentoring and growth accessible to women regardless of where they are in the world or in their careers. As such, the Fellowship is built around a vision of empowerment and interdisciplinary exchange in a community that is both safe and genuinely supportive. The Fellowship offered a varied programme designed to foster learning and connection. Fellows participated in monthly one-hour virtual seminars led by expert women from across global institutions. Small group mentoring sessions, facilitated by a team of four volunteer mentors, offered a more intimate space for reflection, guidance, and personalised support. Fellows reflected on talks and mentoring sessions by posting in a shared Padlet. The programme was further shaped by a mid-year recap that gave the cohort a chance to pause and reflect on their journey together, before culminating in an end-of-year celebration that honoured both the growth and the community built across ten months.

Looking ahead, the Fellowship will welcome its next cohort with even greater momentum. Applications for the upcoming year significantly increased compared to the previous year, which reflects a growing recognition of the programme and the need it meets for women in higher education. This enthusiasm is a clear signal that the Fellowship is resonating and that the community it is building is one that women across the world are eager to be part of. The core elements that have shaped the Fellowship will carry forward into the next cohort, and the team is exploring different mentoring opportunities to further strengthen the support available to Fellows.

When Professor Ernest Fokoué landed in Accra on a rainy Saturday in June, a reception team from the University of Cape Coast (UCC) was waiting at the airport. By Monday morning our educator had toured the campus, met the Dean of the School of Economics, and was ready to teach.

Professor Fokoué, a professor of statistics at the Rochester Institute of Technology, spent the week leading an intensive workshop on Bayesian Networks and Impact Evaluation in Economics. Each day followed the same rhythm in the Old Academic Board Chamber: a morning of lectures, then an afternoon in the lab, where faculty, researchers, and graduate students put every concept straight into practice in R.

What made the week distinctive was its insistence on local relevance. No idea was presented without its code running live, and every method met a Ghanaian or African dataset within minutes of being introduced. Participants modelled poverty and education using Ghana's national living standards survey of over 14,000 households, and evaluated the country's LEAP cash transfer programme as a case study in measuring what really works. From randomised controlled trials to propensity score matching and regression discontinuity design, these are the tools that turn data into evidence for policy.

By Friday, participants were presenting their own mini-projects, each a reproducible analysis they could take home, and the week closed with what Professor Fokoué called the Grand Synthesis: bringing causal evidence and Bayesian modelling together into a single framework. All session materials, lab notebooks, and datasets have since been shared with UCC, where they will support teaching, research supervision, and policy analysis long after the workshop's end.

We are proud to have strengthened the partnership with UCC and to support a generation of economists equipped to bring rigorous, data-driven evidence to the decisions that shape their country.