In a very eventful month, we celebrated our community at Resolve and held two Social Venture Challenges! At One Young World in Bogotá, Colombia and the Igniting Innovation Summit at Harvard—we found 9 new SVC winners, including three working on projects in new countries (Comoros, Guinea, and Tunisia). We are so excited to welcome these nine incredible changemakers and their amazing ventures to the Resolution family!
From One Young World:
• Kennedy Ezekie-Joseph is launching the Calabar Youth Council For Women’s Rights (CYCWR) Leadership Program in Calabar, Nigeria to help teenage victims of female genital mutilation and domestic abuse reintegrate into society and become leaders by providing them with a year-long leadership training program, pairing them with mentors, and granting them access to volunteering and internship experiences to aid their professional development.
• Leroy Mwasaru is launching CampBuni in Nairobi, Kenya, a design thinking and entrepreneurship camp for teens aged 13-18 to engage them in developing innovative solutions for the problems facing their community.
• Ousmane Ba is launching the Girl Child Project in Conakry, Guinea to address the massive gender education gap in Guinea by sending girls in Guinea to school, providing both financial support but also mentoring them to be leaders in their community.
• Mohamed Ali Tourki is launching Community Radio of Ouzio in Ouzio, Comoros to take his community education program and translate into a radio station that will inform, educate and entertain 82,573 people from 4 regions of 67 villages, where 70% of them are illiterate and live in poverty. This will provide them with important information to improve their lives.
From the Igniting Innovation Summit:
• Allen Kenduga is launching Talent Match in Kigali, Rwanda to bridge the gap between knowledge acquired in schools and solving real world problems. Talent Match does this by helping young adults from different college campus and recent graduates in Rwanda get skills training and then internships and jobs. They will screen, recruit, train, and connect students with employers.
• Shantel Marekera is launching Little Dreamers Foundation in Harare, Zimbabwe to open a subsidized pre-school in Glen view 8 for low-income young girls whose guardians can not afford to send them to local pre-schools. This gives young girls access to education despite their parents’ economics and help them discover their potential at a tender age.
• Timi Dayo-kayode is launching TechSpark in Boston, MA to connect startups looking to diversify their tech teams early-on to college students from historically underrepresented backgrounds in tech with the technical expertise to fill technical internship and full-time roles. They anonymize candidate data for most of the application process to mimic ‘blind interviews’ proven to improve diversity percentages.
• Iman Masmoudi is launching Munawwara in Tunis, Tunisia, a community-oriented design label employing Tunisian craftswomen in rural areas to bring traditional designs and modest clothing to Tunis and the world, while empowering the women and their communities through social programs directed at health and education and funded by a portion of the profits.
• Claudia Saavedra is launching Flair Now in Newark, NJ to make college access feasible and relatable through the use of a mobile and web app that provides personalized mentoring to increase college access one click at a time.
Our next SVC is in January in New York City in partnership with the African Leadership Academy (January 4th-7th) and then in February in Boston and New York with the Harvard National Model United Nations Conference and the Youth Assembly at the United Nations, respectively. I hope you’ll join us in welcoming these outstanding new members to our community!