Impact & successes

Thanks to the support and engineering of ANIMA, our organization has been able to benefit from a very important support for the development of our activities in the framework of the Euro-Mediterranean cooperation.
Over the years, with ANIMA’s support and expertise, we have designed projects aimed at fostering business meetings, the upgrading of small and medium-sized enterprises and the transfer of skills, in order to promote sustainable and shared economic development in the Mediterranean.

The EDILE toolkit developed by ANIMA gave us a very good framework to of criteria to assess the impact of investment projects landing in Tunisia. Today we have adapted this methodology to level the amount of grant we give to investors.

It is a great joy for EBAN to cooperate with Anima in contributing to the creation of the world’s innovative and entrepreneurial eco-system.
As a result of our long-year collaboration, EBAN and Anima have together incubated MBAN, the Middle East North Africa Network for Business Angels, Seed Funds and Early Stage Market Players that exists thanks to ANIMA implication.
ANIMA is a unique organization, which combines the passion and drive of start-ups with the discipline, knowledge, and rigor of a most professional NGO.
EBAN feels privileged to work with ANIMA towards our common goals — that of inspiring private sector investment into qualified start-ups throughout the EMEA region and bringing those investments to fruition.

This training provided an opportunity for real exchanges and experience sharing between actors from the north and south of the Mediterranean. I particularly appreciated the continuity between the different modules of this Master Class, at the end of which a concrete project conducted jointly with other Tunisian organizations emerged: the promotion of Tunisian territory through success stories.
The new competences acquired during the modules made us move forward and nourished our reflection as a park of activities to improve its attractiveness.

Thanks to ANIMA, more than a third of the applications for our challenge “Zero Plastic Waste in the Mediterranean” came from countries on the southern shore and a Lebanese winner placed among the top three.

The Centre de promotion des exportations de Tunisie (CEPEX) benefited from a twinning with the Walloon Export and Foreign Investment Agency (AWEX) in 2019. This experience sharing, involving about 20 AWEX staff members, has provided CEPEX management with innovative practices to support exports and the internationalisation of companies.
In 2020, we plan to capitalize on this twinning to develop our new strategy, with a service offer even more responsive to companies.

ANIMA is a dynamic and active network. It provides us with information and contacts with the South Mediterranean which we lack. We are a Mediterranean business woman network and ANIMA helps us to strengthen our links through collaborating on projects and Med Forums

DiafrikInvest has really enabled all the actors in Senegal working with the diaspora to coordinate their services and to develop a common marketing towards the expatriate populations.

The ANIMA business network offered me the opportunity to meet partners and investors, particularly during roadshows; it also allowed me to benefit from valuable advice provided by qualified experts and support from a European incubator to deploy my company internationally.

Benefiting from i-Financing’s monitoring of international financing opportunities in the field of economic development in the Mediterranean enables us to identify opportunities and to position the Agency on cooperation projects that bring additional technical and financial resources to our missions. In addition, we have supplemented this monitoring with a series of training sessions on the management of cooperation projects organised by ANIMA.

ANIMA has both very important institutional networks and a good knowledge of companies in the Mediterranean countries and in some sub-Saharan African countries. During two short missions in Tunisia and Côte d’Ivoire, this enabled us to meet partners with whom to collaborate on tenders in Africa, business leads, and to make ourselves visible to a whole range of actors with whom we would like to collaborate: actors of innovation, local authorities, business federations and ministries.

My multi-month acceleration experience with DiafrikInvest has been fantastic. My coach approaches entrepreneurial issues in an extremely rational way. Where my judgment would be clouded by lack of objective data or by excess of subjectivity, he pushed me to calculate my key indicators in order to be able to make the best decisions. Its more, don’t bring you ready-made solutions. Its merit is rather to push you to find the solution yourself. So when the solution is finally pronounced, it is obvious. Finally, I appreciate the humanistic and benevolent dimension of the coach and the team. After mentoring, the coach helps us today in our fundraising process, which is the culmination of the DiafrikInvest program for us.

The advocacy panels implemented with ANIMA resulted in the development of an intellectual property management regime presented to the government and implemented in five universities across the country.

Over and above the networking, the sharing of ideas and the access to studies of high quality that ANIMA has provided, the network has also allowed us to start the pilot phase of our PACEIM project.  This project has demonstrated the interest that the scientific diaspora from the south of the Mediterranean have when it comes to innovative entrepreneurship.  Today, the project is working with almost 100 entrepreneurs.

I had the privilege of seeing the creation of this network given our involvement, as a founding member, and to experience its evolution through all these years in the Mediterranean. ANIMA, first provided support to IPAs in the MED region, then training and acquisition of Best Practices and finally studies of exceptional quality. ANIMA is also an institutional and business network inescapable!

Access to finance for startups in Africa is limited both by the lack of equity financing and by the inability of many entrepreneurs to understand the expectations of investors and thus to convince them. Faced with these challenges, ANIMA has launched initiatives to stimulate access to Business Angels and crowdfunding and we are proud to collaborate with them in the design and facilitation of an innovative “Investment Readiness” accelerator for entrepreneurs in Africa and the Diaspora with collective coaching through the “Investment Academy” and individual coaching “tailor-made” for each entrepreneur.

Hosting the launch conference of THE NEXT SOCIETY and two training seminars the following year in Athens allowed us to benefit from ANIMA’s network to promote Greek economic actors as well as our expertise to a large international audience.

Our involvement in the ANIMA network has allowed for the creation of Tunisian dairy product business clusters, the strengthening of our project management and marketing skills and the development of cooperation with different Mediterranean partners.