Pitch Event – Skills Outside School Foundation

SOSF LEAD4CHANGE INNOVATORS INITIATIVE PITCH EVENT 17, DECEMBER 2022

Following the completion of the Advanced Lead4Change Change Hub, all 11 participants were paired with business mentors in their various fields. Participants were also requested to develop pitch decks for their various social projects/social businesses. Their submissions led us to our six (6) finalists.

MEET THE PARTICIPANTS PITCHING BELOW:

Emmanuella Appiah is a 26 years old native of Ashanti, living in Kumasi. She has worked in the sustainability industry for the past four years, volunteering with a number of organisations who helped her to kick start this business. Professionally she is a brand strategist and graphic designer with over 6 years of experience. She is also skilled in copywriting and social media marketing. She is a third year student of KNUST studying BSc. Forest Resources Technology.

She started and currently still volunteers for Mckingtorch Africa and Kali Etch Foundation in 2019. She briefly volunteered with Recycle Up Ghana where she learnt about business development with design thinking strategy. In late 2020, she led a team to represent Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology to participate in the ASU Devex World Hackathon where they presented a prosthetic leg made out of recycled plastic, bamboo, and sawdust, and they won in our category.

From September 2020 to March 2021, She was trained in sustainable business development by Impact Hub Accra, after which she won a grant of GHS15,000. She used this money in addition to GHS 20,000 she gathered from friends and family to register Green Ecoworks and used the rest to buy machines for prototyping and testing of the recycled plastic material.

During this period Emmanella collected plastic waste from the campus of KNUST and used some of it in her experiments. Throughout 2021, she collected over 350 kilograms, Used about 80kilograms of bottletops, and gave the rest to a nearby recycling firm. By March 2022, she had studied and refined the process of making panels out of HDPE and PP. She had also learned how to operate small scale machinery for making lumber out of plastic waste.

She currently manage every part of the business from administration, procurement, production, marketing, sales, accounting, management etc. In times when she encounters something that goes beyond her knowledge and abilities, she consults her team members who contribute gladly. They are also occupied with their own engagements and are not available to handle full delegation of work since she is not paying them. When her and her team start full operations with monthly income guaranteed, she can hire some of the team members or entirely new people and delegate most of these roles to focus on the growth strategy of the company. She also consults with mentors who are experienced in the business world and are ready to offer her advice and professional assistance when they can. She has proposed that they become members of the company advisory board and they have agreed.

Michael Onoja is a social activist, the co-lead activist of a social movement called Evolve Nigeria. He is a third year student of computer science at Federal University Lokoja, a creative writer, video creator, and graphic designer.

Having identified the poor purchase of locally-made goods as a core hindrance to economic progress, he and his team then realized that people had no easy way of accessing or identifying these products, so they decided to came up with an idea to build a marketplace that does not just accommodate manufacturers, but local farmers and artisans as well.

Bello Olakeu Abdussalam is an intellectually curious social innovator who is passionate about addressing global health, educational and environmental issues. Currently, he is a member of the Nigeria Youth Task Team of the Africa Youth Partnership for Equitable Recovery from COVID-19 pandemic.

Abdussalam has won several awards and prizes including SDSN’s Climate Champion Innovation Award, LEAP Africa’s Community Project Grant Award and Aleto

Foundation Leadership Challenge. Abdussalam is also an undergraduate medical student of Ahmadu Bello University Zaria-Nigeria. He enjoys researching, writing and networking.

Edward Osei is a Ghanaian and holds a Bachelor of Science in Petroleum Engineering (honors) from the University of Mines and Technology, Tarkwa.

He has worked in the upstream oil and gas industry for about 2years. He is the co-founder of Tenax Oilfield Limited, a registered company which provides services to the oil and gas industry in Ghana. He currently works as a welder and Fabricator at Mchammah Engineering Company Limited.

He is very passionate about TVET and believes in skill development. It is out of this belief He is establishing Skillup Savannah, a non-profit organization which aims to train the youth in welding and fabrication. He loves Engineering.

Lilian is a policy expert, passionate about effective policies for good governance, strengthened democracies, education, and development. She is currently a master’s student of International Relations at Oxford Brookes University. Lilian hopes to use her passion-driven expertise through Intelligence Data to advocate for policies and programs that strengthen democracies, development, and good governance.

Lilian has worked on various programmes and projects that promote accountability, transparency, good governance, citizen engagement and social advocacy and one of such is the Freedom of Information Advocacy to enlighten citizens on the use and awareness of the FOI as a tool for accountability and transparency. She was recognised in 2020, as an African Union Top 20 Innovators.

She has also worked in the Policy and International development space with organizations such as AIA International Foundation, Ymonitor, Electoral College Nigeria, Lagos state government etcetera and has worked on several evelopment and governance-oriented projects such as the ROLAC Anti-corruption project, Governance Barometer, Lagos State Government on the Eko Excel Project, Slum2School Africa and currently works on an Almajiri Reformation Project called Skills on Wheels to empower Street children with educational and economic skills.

Lilian is also a 2021 commonwealth scholar, Young Innovation Leader fellow and a Goldin Global fellow

Sayedi Umar Mohammed is a certified Business Manager from the European Business University of Luxembourg, a Final year student of Applied Chemistry Usman Danfodiyo University Sokoto. He is the CEO and founder of GreenLITE Solution and Glowsum cosmetics.

A campus reporter at Vanguard Press UDUS and Director of Graphics at Drug-Free Club UDUS. As an advocate of a greener society, he founded GreenLITE solution; a startup firm that focuses on recycling plastic waste and peanut husk waste into a wooden-like material known as PHP composites, to replace wood and reduce deforestation and plastic waste.

Some of his remarkable achievements includes, a 2021 NSVP finalist, 2022 Hultz prize on-campus winner, Young innovative leader fellow, 2022 cohort and once a participant in the Innovation Challenge in Sustainable Chemistry and Waste.

Snippet of participants sharing briefs of their projects