Global Social Benefit Incubator (GSBI™) program – Call for Applications

The Santa Clara University’s Center for Science, Technology and Society has opened the application process for the Global Social Benefit Incubator (GSBI™) program which gives an opportunity to socially-minded entrepreneurs to build sustainable, scalable organizations that solve problems for people living in poverty around the world.

The Program works with organizations that create value by lifting people out of poverty, utilizing self-sustaining community practices, and developing low-cost solutions. The GSBI is a combination of online, experiential, and skill-building offerings in a ten-month program. It also collaborates with a diverse group of partners including successful Silicon Valley executives, academic leaders, and the network of Jesuit universities.

Read more http://www.yipekenya.org/GSBI.htm

2012 Millennium Youth Camp

Venue: Helsinki

Technology Academy Finland and the Finnish Science Education Centre LUMA are going to organize the 2012 Millennium Youth Camp to be held in Helsinki Metropolitan Region, Finland in June 2012.

In this context, young people from all over the world born between 1993 and 1996 are invited to apply for a place in the 2012 Millennium Youth Camp.

During this camp, about 30 talented and young people from different parts of the world will meet for a week to work together on different projects on mathematics, science and technology. These young people will also get a chance to meet famous scientists as well as the 2012 Millennium Technology Prize Winner during this event.

About Millennium Youth Camp

The Millennium Youth Camp is held on an annual basis, attended by students from all continents. In 2011, almost 1500 young people from a hundred different countries applied to take part. One of the camp’s primary goals is to encourage young scientists to network at an early stage in their careers and help them launch a career in science or technology.

During the camp, Millennium Youth Campers are presented with an overview of Finnish expertise and top-level research in the natural sciences, mathematics and technology. They are introduced to a number of Finnish companies and institutes of higher education.

In addition to lectures, workshops and visits to Youth Camp partners, the camp programme includes project work supervised by top-level experts and carried out in small multi-national groups. The Millennium Youth Camp’s official language is English.

The week-long 2012 Millennium Youth Camp will take place in the Helsinki Metropolitan Region and start on 9 June 2012. Participation is free of charge. As in previous years, the project themes are:

• climate change,
• renewable natural resources and energy,
• water,
• ICT and digitalisation, and
• applied mathematics.

This international camp offers like-minded young people who are interested in mathematics, science and technology a chance to spend a week doing project work together and also meet top scientists, the 2012 Millennium Technology Prize winner and people working in Finnish companies and organizations.

Camp Organizers

The camp’s main organisers are Technology Academy Finland and the Finnish Science Education Centre LUMA.

Application Process

In the first phase, young people from all over the world who were born between 1993 and 1996 are eligible to apply for a place in the 2012 Millennium Youth Camp using the online application form.

The names of the 100 applicants selected for the second phase of the application process will be published on 1^st February 2012, and they will be given a period of four weeks to produce project plans. Some applicants will be interviewed by telephone in connection with their proposals.

The 30 camp participants will be selected by a steering group consisting of representatives of Finnish higher educational institutions and Millennium Youth Camp partners. The names of the successful applicants will be published on 15 March 2012.

Last date for submitting the applications is December 19^th 2011.

For more information, visit http://www.technologyacademy.fi/millennium-youth-camp.html

The Tech Awards 2012 – Call for Nominations

The Tech Awards is an initiative of the Tech Museum that was launched in November 2000 to recognize innovators who try to apply technology for the benefit of the humanity.

These awards honour individuals, non-profit organizations and for-profit companies who are using technology to significantly improve human conditions in 5 award categories.

The award concept and the five different categories of Tech Awards were inspired in part by the State of the Future report, published by the Millennium Project of the American Council of the United Nations University.

The Tech Museum is currently inviting nominations for the Tech Awards 2012. The Tech Awards program inspires global engagement in applying technology to humanity’s most pressing problems by recognizing individuals, organizations, and companies that use innovative technology solutions.

Read more http://www.yipekenya.org/Tech.htm

Women of Vision Award for Innovation

Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (ABI) is an organisation that has developed tools and programmes designed to help industry, academia and government recruit, retain and develop women technology leaders since 1997. The organisation provides inclusive platforms designed to ensure women’s voices, ideas and spirits will result in higher levels of technical innovation. The ABI delivers programmes that are changing the world for women and for technology.

The ABI invites nominations for the Women of Vision Award for Innovation, which recognises a leading technical woman who has contributed significantly to technology innovation.

Read more http://www.yipekenya.org/ABI.htm

2011 Ink Fellows Program

THE INK CONFERENCE, in associated with TED, is an annual conference that aims to fuel innovation and foster knowledge by bringing together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers from a range of disciplines such as art, design, science, social entrepreneurship, sports and technology.

INK 2010 featured Speakers such as science educator and innovator Arvind Gupta, filmmaker James Cameron, founder of Wired magazine Kevin Kelly, design guru Philippe Starck, and anti-trafficking activist Sunitha Krishnan.

THE INK FELLOWS PROGRAM will recruit 20 young innovators to attend the INK 2011 Conference in Jaipur, India, December 8th – 11th, 2011.

For further information, visit http://bit.ly/pNVpwK

Orange African Social Venture Prize

The African Social Venture Prize will reward three projects or enterprises addressing needs of the bottom of the pyramid markets in Africa through technology.

The digital projects range from e-health and mobile banking to digital and mobile applications for education or agriculture. They therefore represent huge opportunities for social development.

For further information, visit http://bit.ly/nBmGpL

Lessons on entrepreneurship and innovation from Brazil

Yesterday’s Sunday Standard had an article written by Prof. Anyang’ Nyong’o, Minister for Medical Services on why Kenya needs a science and technology driven economy to thrive. Coming at the back drop of Brazilian President Lula da Silva’s visit to Kenya, the article raises several points for why Brazil is a major emerging economy,  and which Prof. Nyong’o posits is due to the Brazilian government prioritising innovation as a major development concern. In turn he states that policies regarding technology as well as scientific societies need to be mainstreamed into Kenya’s national development.

However probably as a result of column space, a reader could maybe assume that making the public sector friendlier to technology change is all that is required. That ensuring adequate public resources are directed into science and technology will firmly put Kenya on the trajectory to become the middle income economy envisaged in Vision 2030. But that ignores the human aspect.

Brazil has placed emphasis on it's SME sector which accounts, just like Kenya for the majority of jobs and businesses in the economy. Indeed, according to an article on the Kaufman Institute for Entrepreneurship’s website titled Brazil’s Entrepreneurship Boom, the increase in new companies in Brazil has been linked with the country’s developing entrepreneurial culture and mindset. Each year this has been demonstrated by the number of participants in Global Entrepreneurship Week which increased from 1.5 million entrepreneurs in 2008 to 5.3 million in 2009.

And even though the country’s listing on the ease of doing business index has recorded similar challenges as Kenya in terms of high tax rates; as well as having structural impediments such as an education system that does not engender financial literacy, Brazil’s entrepreneurship development policy is strikingly different in that it focuses on promoting high-growth ventures as opposed to Kenya’s policy of just creating enterprises with the hopes that they will one day be able to create jobs.

This has meant that Brazil’s high impact intervention has brought about more immediate impacts on the economy, than the more laid back approach of just creating ventures with little regard for growth.

Similar to Kenya where according to the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports, there are 2.5 million unemployed youth and barely 125,000 are absorbed into the formal sector annually; young people in Brazil aged between 18 and 24 years account for 36% of the country’s unemployed. Nevertheless, lessons learned on Brazil’s focus on innovation as well as the promotion of an entrepreneurial spirit does give hope that indeed Kenya could just be on a positive path to Vision 2030, come the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.

Sage Kenya, Promoting Entrepreneurship Where it Matters the Most

SAGE Kenya is a country chapter of the Students for the Advancement of Global Entrepreneurship, a global community of teenage entrepreneurs sharing a common purpose. Started in 2009, Sage Kenya’s mission is to help create the next generation of entrepreneurial leaders whose innovations and social enterprises address the world’s major unmet needs.

Much of Sage Kenya’s work is currently within Western Kenya preparing students for success in college and in the competitive global community by linking them to role models from  Maseno and Great Lakes Universities.

SAGE Kenya has also worked with high schools within Kisumu East and West District to inculcate the culture of entrepreneurship among students by assisting them to set up model entrepreneurial projects.

The organization also has a mentorship programme working with university and polytechnics to assign one to two student mentors to each high school to assist participating schools to prepare for district competitions. This opportunity provides the students with a platform to develop their problem solving, opportunity-seeking and informed risk-taking entrepreneurial acumen that will be of use in starting their own commercial or social ventures in the future.

Current projections are that SAGE Kenya will be instrumental in creating between 100 to 400 more new entrepreneurial ventures annually.

During a recent competition, students from various schools presented ventures that included:

• Agriculture: a solar anti-ripening machine made from local materials such as polythene bags. 
• Health: a student design team presented a demonstration kit that educates the youth on the effect of nicotine to the lungs. This model is now being used by the Drug Abuse Campaign in Kenya. 
• Technology: a solar water purifier has been developed . 
• Food security: a Hydroponic Cultivation system has been developed using designed Shade nets that use old mosquito nets and local tree poles that reduce the cost of pest control among farmers. 
• E-Government: some student have developed a central database system that can be adopted by the Government to have all the government operations in and a central system. 
• Eco-Energy: using Jatropha as alternative source of energy, some students have developed a model plantation for a jatropha seed nursery. 
• Recycling: some students have started to sell curio product made from water hyacinth which is a nuisance from the Lake Victoria.

The timing for a programmes like SAGE Kenya cannot be better, and the organization is lobbying the government to make the education system more relevant and rigorous whilst at the same time promoting an entrepreneurial culture amongst students.

Indeed SAGE Kenya’s approach is a “pattern-changing idea to practical innovation”. The emphasis on the practical, scalable and cost-effective shows that it is a progressive organization that teaches students to create sustainable profits and more jobs for their peers.