BLAZE by Safaricom hosted the fourth BLAZE Be Your Own Boss Summit (BYOB) over the weekend at Mariakani Vocational Education and Training Centre in Kilifi County.
More than 1,300 youth from Kilifi County got a chance to engage and learn from BLAZE partners and mentors on entrepreneurship at the BYOB Summit.
The Mariakani summit marked the start of BLAZE engagements in the Coast region and comes two weeks after the conclusion Western Region Summits. The summits in that region saw over 9,000 young people attending in Kakamega, Kisii and Kisumu Counties. The regional engagement will culminate in a creation camp in Mombasa where entrepreneurs will have an opportunity to pitch their business ideas, with the top 3 in 8 categories sharing Ksh. 800,000 in business support.
BYOB Summits features youth mentorship sessions and creation camps that are focused on empowering Kenyan youth to achieve success by providing valuable information, skills and networking opportunities in a variety of fields. They include creative arts, fashion, film and photography, music, agriculture, sales and production and sports.
Like in previous editions, attendees interacted with local mentors who are industry experts through interest-specific pods where they went through workshops and learnt from the mentor’s experience.
The Mariakani Edition featured mentors such as Fundi Frank (fashion designer), Nana Kimemia (IQ mentor), Catherine Kamau (Actress), Eric Musyoka (Music Producer), Jibril Blessing (Video Director), among others.
In addition to the mentors, BLAZE has partnered with Huawei, Google, IBM, USAID, Wezesha and other partners, to provide a mix of content, training and employment opportunities to BLAZE subscribers who attend the summits.
To complement the summits, BLAZE has also introduced a new platform dubbed BLAZE LINK. The platform is an aggregator of e-learning resources built to enable young people upgrade their skills through online courses and empower them to pursue success in their professions of interest.
BLAZE is a sub-brand of Safaricom and was created to give youth aged 26 years and below products, services and benefits tailored specifically to meet their everyday needs.