Zuhura Africa, a women-led organization, is calling on the youth in Kenya to co-create social enterprises addressing challenges affecting their communities. Based in Nairobi, the organization focuses on championing the youth agenda due to the high number of people living in Africa between the age of 15 and 24.
Since its inception, Zuhura has had programs such as the Africa Basque Challenge (ABC), an entrepreneurship experience where youth from different countries work together to create solutions for local problems. The program started in November 2018 and February 2019 and involved 48 innovators from Kenya, Somalia and the Basque region (autonomous community of Spain). The bootcamp entailed 6 days in Kenya and a week in the Basque Region, encouraging young people to co-create and transform their ideas into businesses.
At the end of the boot camp, 11 companies were created by multi-disciplinary teams. The teams pitched their project ideas to potential investors and the winning teams were awarded 15,000 euros. They are currently running the third edition which will focus on Kenyan and Senegalese youth.
Zuhura Africa Hub Manager, Muriel Akiko noted, “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.”
Zuhura has also partnered with UNICEF in their global program, UPSHIFT which helps youth in technology and innovation, by digitizing the program for the Kenyan youth. 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 and private investors who believe in their cause.