Bassita

Thematic areas: crowd-funding

Country: Egypt

Egypt has a variety of developmental causes and initiatives that everyday citizens are not aware of, and thus lack funding and support from the society.

Bassita is an Egyptian web-based start-up that focuses on social and environmental causes, and aids in their development through the use of cause-marketing.

The Clickfunding Model was born in January 2014 when the founders of Bassita recognized the lack of interaction between internet users and development causes and decided to tackle this gap by creating a short-cut for the traditional funding processes. Their aim was to provide a mechanism. The Bassita team developed the first Clickfunding model in the world, which aims to transform everyday web-users into web philanthropists through the click of a mouse.

How it works?

• Bassita’s website hosts short videos on specific and easy-to-fulfill causes, and each cause is connected to a sponsor.
• When the video reaches the targeted amount of points (calculated based on views, likes, shares, tweets and comments) the sponsor fulfills the cause.
• The Bassita Clickfunding model is unique and different from other funding models, as the internet user is not asked to fund a cause, but to watch and interact with a video on the internet.

 In order to accomplish its mission, Bassita works in collaboration with four main categories of stakeholders.

1. The cause itself; (CSO, entrepreneur, social initiatives) with specific needs
2. The sponsor who fulfills the cause when the video reaches the targeted amount of visibility
3. Bassita’s team of community partners: they support the dissemination of the video on their platforms, internal newsletters, as well as their social media outlets
4. The internet user, by sharing, commenting and liking he allows the cause to get fulfilled while creating visibility for the sponsor

 

Achievements:

Bassita has carried out its first project in collaboration with Baraka Fashion to deliver eyeglasses to artisans in Khalta, a village in the governorate of Fayoum. The campaign was successful, as the video released by Bassita about the cause received 10,000 views and Baraka Fashion provided 1,000 eyeglasses to artisans in rural communities.Among many others success stories there is also for an example of : water life

A video showing the comedian Maged al-Kedawny, along with the Arabic hashtag “a click connects to water,” was viewed on Facebook more than two million times in three days after the campaign’s launch in February and he collect 1,000 Water Connections in Upper Egypt.

Bassita won the Young Innovators Award which is under the umbrella of Nahdet El Mahrousa and is an innovation program.

In January, 2015, Thinkers and Doers; an international forum at the Arab World Institute in Paris recognized Bassita as one of the most impactful projects in the Middle East. 

Replicability:

Bassita only relies on information technology, which can be easily accessed in most countries. The replication the solution is affordable.

Prizes:

• Bassita crowdfunding was selected among ‘’La France S’Engage au Sud’s’’ 10 Best Social Innovations in a developing country. And also ClickFunding has been described by the French president as a model able to contribute to better societies, in the South [of the Mediterranean] but also in Europe
• The clickfunding has been won INJAZ Al-Arab competition in 2016
• Bassita won a 2015 Orange Prize for African social ventures