Empowering Young People through Innovation Leadership
Young Innovation Leaders Fellowship
The Young Innovation Leaders (YIL) Fellowship is a platform for training and mentoring young professionals in innovation management. It is an annual 4-month intensive training programme which targets bright individuals, aged 20-30, across Africa. One of the components of this programme is the projects in which fellows use tools they have honed to solve some of the most complex and important challenges in society. The young professionals solve two kinds of challenges: first are organizational problems submitted by the organizations for which they require innovative solutions such as tools to track progress of alumni of universities and second are those identified within the communities such as water and sanitation issues.
The YIL Fellowship aims to train skilled youth on how to inspire, initiate, manage and lead innovation in their spheres of influence. The training programme has been running since 2018 and in its third cohort and has partnered with multilateral agencies, international organisations, corporate organisations and foundations. Examples of these include: United Nation Population Fund, Charles and Lynn Schustermann Family Foundation, United Nations Volunteers, Plan International, Agrited Ltd, and First City Monument Bank, Nigeria.
"Engaging her young people in innovation for development is the strategy that Africa needs for this era. And for her to make the necessary leap and occupy its pride of place in today's world, its young people must have a mental model shift from consumption to value creation and value innovation"
The YIL Fellowship uses design thinking to solve developmental challenges. The programme teaches participants methods to create solutions out of problems and the training programme explores the science of solution creation. The identified problems are approached and categorized based on their source; the two tracks used to categorise problems are the Organisational (institutional track) and the Community (Inventive track). The selected participants of the programme solve the problems of their choice and this choice is made based on acquired skill and interest.
The process followed in the programme is:
The first step is the selection to the YIL fellows through 4 distinct stages.
Stage 1: General screening based on the selection criteria: age (21 - 30 years), above average academic performance, stage in career and measurable hard skill.
Stage 2: Candidates write 6 short essays (250 - 300 words each) which examine their level of self-awareness, expression of self, understanding of their environment, general knowledge of their field of study, and knowledge on the power of support systems.
Stage 3: A 2 min video on YouTube stating why they should be selected into the fellowship.
Stage 4: Prework: Our applicants do a compulsory pre-work exercise to get them prepared for the in-person training and workshops, which are more practically oriented. During this stage, they are subscribed to online courses on innovation management where they learn courses like design thinking and the lean business model. They are required to pass an online open quiz after the pre-work to participate in the programme.
- Application of a problem-centred methodology (design-thinking) is taught to participants during the boot camp:
- Identify a Problem: Participants scope the problem and align to SDG goals
- Understand the Problem: Participants are taught how to use primary and secondary resource tools to understand the problem
- Define the Problem: The problem is now defined and exacted.
- Formulate a Challenge: Framing participants to see the problem as the challenge they need to solve.
- Ideate: Using brainstorming and brainwriting (online sessions) to come up with leads to solve the challenge
- Develop Concepts: Filter the best ideas and assemble them into detailed solutions and evaluate them
- Test Assumptions: Teams test if the key assumptions are true, answering the question, “is the solution feasible, viable, desirable and defensible?”
- Prototype: Bring the concept to life with detail and form
- Perform a Learning Launch: Involve potential consumers and the market place
- Pilot: Creation of a high-fidelity prototype/Minimum Viable Product
- Publish: Data gathered during the learning launch and pilot is published to partners and investors
- Scale: If solutions are viable, the product is funded to a start-up level.
- Application of the lean methodology. For every product created, a pattern for designing and testing is followed: Low-fidelity prototype ? High-fidelity prototype ? minimum viable product This step depends on the product’s viability and availability of funding for the product.
- Trained 190 young professionals in innovation leadership.
- Over 5000 hours of mentorship from experts
- More than 25 innovations were created. Some of the innovations created have been commercialized such as theragist.com and Any-Innovation; while some others are being incubated.
- Fellows have gone ahead to create social impact programs affecting over 20,000 persons across Africa
- YIL Fellowship helped young professionals to develop innovation skills; this was enabled by engaging youth with problems that they can relate to.
- Two startups were created from the programme; the first being Alterfold, an innovative toilet system which provides a safe, hygienic, sustainable, and affordable public toilet system made from recycled plastics and uses 50% less water to flush than the normal WC. The second start-up is Theragist (theragist.com), an online psycho-social intervention platform that is designed to improve mental health in young people.
Challenges/ Barriers:
- Being unable to fully engage the participants during the fellowship due to inadequate funding.
- Not having enough partnerships, we can leverage to pilot most of our solutions.
Moving forward
- The next stage of growth for the YIL Fellowship is to create an investment fund. This will serve as seed round investment for the piloting of our solutions.
- Also, we plan to partner with other organizations to take the YIL Fellowship to more African countries.
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