Achenyo Idachaba: Innovative Entrepreneur
Achenyo Idachaba is one among African women entrepreneurs determined to find solutions to some of the world’s challenging environmental problems and also create businesses opportunities for others.
Her courage to resign from her corporate career in the United States and relocate to Nigeria and become a social entrepreneur isn’t the type you encounter every day.
Achenyo founded MitiMeth, a one-of its-kind enterprise based in Ibadan, Nigeria. Her firm found an innovative eco-solution to Nigeria’s problem of having its waterways invaded by highly destructive water hyacinth plants, thereby creating a huge and unique business opportunity for herself and many other persons out there.
Achenyo and her team at MitiMeth takes nuisance weeds and transform them into beautiful hand-crafted and highly desirable products. But that’s not all. She also educates others on how to transform invasive plants in riverine areas into ropes for weaving.
She won the Cartier award, the women’s initiative award for sub-Saharan Africa, in 2014.
Abayomi Rotimi Mighty: Exceptional Public Speaker
Abayomi Rotimi Mighty is as an exceptional young public speaker whose voice commands much attention and respect.
Abayomi did not just happen. He started public speaking when he was 11, advocating for his fellow students’ rights in secondary school. He became famous as an articulate and brilliant lad orator in his home town and environs and was eventually trained as a Peer Educator with focus on public health issues.
Abayomi’s public speaking career took a soaring leap at the age of 16, when spoke at the African Leaders Summit in 2001 as the United Nations Youths Spokesperson (Ambassador) for African Youths and children in the presence of President Bill Clinton and other world leaders.
Having served as executive director and consultant of Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation (WOTCLEF), and Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation respectively, he founded NOVOHUB, a Lagos based business development and a knowledge hub dedicated to creating and introducing cutting-edge innovations in businesses, governance and social works.
Njideka Harry: Effecting Change with Technology
Introducing Njideka Harry as a social entrepreneur with difference is not an exaggeration. Her huge contribution to improving the lives of young people and women in developing countries qualifies her for even better encomiums.
Driven not by profit but her passion to deploy technology to transform the lives of youth and women in developing countries, Njideka founded Youth for Technology Foundation, an innovative non-profit organization that seeks to equip young people with appropriate technology and entrepreneurship skills.
YTF works with the government, academia, private sector and grassroots organisations, to ensure that under-privileged youth and women have the opportunity to improve their standard of living through its developmental programs and facilitating connections that hasten business opportunities.
It’s even more amazing that YTF has expanded its operations to Uganda, Cameroon, Kenya, and to Colombia in Latin America, having over 1.4 million beneficiaries, while 40 per cent of its graduates have gone on to be employed and are earning three times the average salary of a non-YTF Academy graduate.
With 38 per cent of YTF graduates owning their businesses, Njideka’s initiative has been of tremendous impart to younger generation. No wonder she was awarded ‘Social Entrepreneur of the Year’ by the Schwab Foundation and the World Economic Forum in 2013.
