The second in a packed series taking you inside our Scholars Entrepreneurship Fund (SEF) 2.0 entrepreneurship and venture development programme. This week's edition features Purity Gakii Kirea, an MPhil candidate in Education, Globalisation and International Development. She is also the co-founder of ColdCure Kenya.
In the run-up to this year's Scholars Entrepreneurship Fund (SEF) 2.0 competition, scholars were invited to attend a rigorous pitch clinic. The goal went beyond refining concepts, to sharpening how we could articulate our businesses under the pressure of real investor scrutiny. Here, I reflect on how that session shaped my thinking and strengthened the venture my co-founder Tasha Mapenzi and I built together as we prepared to take it to the judges.
There is a difference between knowing your product and being able to defend it in a room of experts. The SEF 2.0 Pitch Clinic made that difference impossible to ignore.
The message from Uche, the programme’s Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship Coordinator was clear and direct from the start: "You are not competing against each other; you are competing against your own ability to communicate".
If you walk into that room and cannot convince a judge that you truly understand what you are building, no amount of passion will save you.
The baseline was simple but unforgiving; know your product, know your numbers, know the problem you are solving well enough to explain it to a stranger in the first sixty seconds.
What the session forced us to confront was how much we had been speaking around our idea rather than through it by using the right words without always landing the right meaning. Who is your customer? Where does the money flow? What makes your solution the right fit for this specific community?
These were not difficult questions on paper. Under the pressure of that room, they demanded a different level of preparation entirely. The honest answer was that we were close, but not yet sharp enough. And that was exactly the point of the clinic.
ColdCure Kenya is a solar-powered service enterprise based in Mombasa. The idea was born from a very simple, very painful story.
Along the Kenyan coastline, as the sun sets around seven in the evening, an old woman packs up her stall. She came to the market with seven fish. She sold two. With no way to keep the rest fresh overnight, she walks home with only two options: eat the five remaining fish or watch them go to waste. The same story repeats itself every day, the same early morning, the same effort out at sea, and the same quiet loss at the end of the day. She does not fail because she works too little. She fails because there is nowhere to put what she has caught.
ColdCure Kenya exists to change that. We provide pay-per-use cold storage, solar-powered, to fisherfolk at rates built around daily coastal incomes. The fish stays fresh. We charge only for the service.
The case goes beyond income. Preventing spoilage recovers the fuel, labour, and ocean resources embedded in every catch. Fully solar operations eliminate diesel emissions and protect against fuel price shocks. And by extending shelf life, fisherfolk can fish less frequently while maintaining the same income which directly eases pressure on Kenya's stressed coastal fish stocks and supporting the country's Blue Economy Strategy and National Climate Change Action Plan. In my head, this was always a compelling story. What the clinic forced me to ask was: am I telling it in a way that lands?
Purity and Tahsa at SEF 2.0 Pitch Day
The session left us with one clear message: know your product better than anyone in that room. Not the vision alone but also the product. The numbers, the customer, the problem, the model. If you cannot defend your baseline, you cannot earn the funding.
Tasha and I walked out with enough clarity. The clinic stripped away everything that was not essential and left us with a pitch that was compact, more honest, and far more ready for the room we were about to walk into.
By Purity Gakii Kirea, MPhil Candidate in Education, Globalisation and International Development & Co-founder, ColdCure.