Zuhura Africa offers youth opportunity to turn ideas into social enterprises

Through boot camps, the women-led organisation helps the youth create opportunities for themselves and their communities.

Zuhura Africa, a women-led organization has opened its doors to Africa’s youth as a social impact community where innovation, entrepreneurship and technology flourish. Their aim is to support the boldest early-stage innovators and entrepreneurs to grow and scale their business, through social innovation boot camps.

The organization’s main focus is to champion the youth agenda – Africa is the continent with the youngest population in the world with upward of 200 million people in that age bracket. With current figures showcasing the number will double by 2045, according to the 2012 African Economic Outlook by African Development Bank (AfDB), UNDP, among others, there is a need to support the youth.

Zuhura Africa hopes to provide them with tools to create businesses for sustainable development and help them make employment for themselves and others.

Speaking about the initiative, Zuhura Africa, Hub Manager, Muriel Akiko said, “Despite being a young women-led organization, at Zuhura Africa, we understand the challenges facing Africa’s youth, for this reason, we are champions for promoting both entrepreneurship, business scale-up and innovation to support Africa’s youth as a whole.”

As with previous boot camps held in 2018 and 2019, this year’s boot camp in partnership with UNICEF’s UPSHIFT global program will challenge young people to co-create and transform ideas into businesses. The teams will have the opportunity to pitch their project ideas to potential investors and the winning teams will be awarded 15,000 euros. This year’s boot camp is currently running and focuses on youth from Kenya & Senegal.

The program began in October and will conclude in Feb 2022, where the selected project team shall receive seed funding and also the remaining teams will be guided on how to get funding from government & private investors who believe in their cause.

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