We're proud to welcome Black British Initiative to Makerble.

Black British Initiative (BBI) is a registered charity and the organisation behind the MBA 30 programme, a four-week executive education course designed specifically for Black entrepreneurs, delivered in partnership with SOAS University of London and the Stephen Lawrence Day Foundation. Accredited by SOAS, the programme is designed to help underserved Black entrepreneurs gain the tools, networks and confidence to scale their businesses sustainably. It was named to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Stephen Lawrence's passing and enrols 30 students per cohort. BBI is now on Cohort 12, meaning hundreds of Black entrepreneurs have been through its doors since the first cohort launched in September 2023.

An intensive programme

MBA 30 is an intensive practical programme that's designed around the specific challenges Black entrepreneurs face, recognising that time and cost are barriers to entry for micro and small businesses. Participants consistently describe it as transformational, pointing to increased confidence, stronger networks and a clearer sense of how to approach growth and funding.

Why impact measurement matters now

With Cohort 12 underway and funders and stakeholders increasingly asking what the data shows, BBI reached the point that many education and training charities reach: the programme was clearly working, participants and alumni communicated that consistently, but the evidence needed to be more rigorous, structured and straightforward to communicate. That would mean moving from manual processes and spreadsheets to a system that could track individual participants across cohorts, measure change over time against consistent indicators and produce the kind of defensible data that funders now expect.

What Makerble will do for BBI

BBI will be using Makerble MissionKit™ to build a longitudinal evidence base across the MBA 30 programme. Each cohort will be set up as a project within Makerble, with participants recorded as individual contacts. Baseline surveys will be completed at the start of each cohort, capturing where participants are at the outset in terms of business turnover, confidence across specific competencies, and access to networks and funding. Follow-up surveys will then go out automatically at regular intervals.

The result will be a clear picture of change over time: not just that 30 people completed the programme, but how their situations, confidence and business outcomes shifted as a result. That data will be visible at the individual level for each participant and at the programme level across all cohorts, giving BBI the evidence base it needs to make its case to funders and stakeholders with precision rather than assertion.

BBI will also commission Makerble Consulting to deliver a retrospective impact assessment reaching back to earlier cohort alumni, gathering their data and documenting the distance they have travelled since completing the programme. For Cohort 1 in particular, that is now more than two years of entrepreneurial journey to account for.

The part that makes this different

Makerble's founder completed the MBA 30 in Cohort 1. The networks, the education and the peer community that BBI built around that first programme were part of the journey that brought Makerble to where it is today. BBI believed in supporting Black entrepreneurial talent before it had the data to prove its impact. Now it will have that data, and the platform it is using to gather it owes something of its own story to the programme it is now measuring. We are genuinely glad to be part of what BBI is building.

Black British Initiative is a registered charity (No. 1198015). Find out more about the MBA 30 programme and BBI's work at blackbritishinitiative.com.

If you run an education or training programme and want to demonstrate its impact with confidence, get in touch.

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