Building Doors to Opportunity

American comedian and actor Milton Berle once said: “If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.”

I was reminded of this quote when I heard the story of Laetitia. At the age of 14, Laetitia was driven to start breeding rabbits in the remote village of Bukura in Kenya. Now note: Laetitia is not your average teenager. She realized there was a growing demand for rabbit meat which is a popular delicacy among the locals and foreigners who visited the city. She also learned that rabbits are very easy to breed and had a lot of benefits: they are a good source of protein, their fur can be used to make winter clothing, their waste as manure and urine as organic pesticide in farming.

Through this rabbit breeding project, Laetitia was able to start the Women’s Rabbit Association in Bukura, where she employs 10 women and pays each of them at the end of every month to support themselves and their families. With her passion for education, the project also supports school children with school uniforms and stationeries.

This brings me to the point of innovation and entrepreneurship in Africa. Africa has been facing largely the same problems for many generations, such as access to food, clean water and education. Just like Laetitia, there are several young and passionate self-starters across the continent who are armed with the can-do spirit, and who defy all odds to strike it big and make their communities and the continent a better place.

According to the 2016 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s annual report which came out earlier this year, Sub-Saharan Africa is the region with by far the highest number of people involved in early-stage entrepreneurial activity. Several other rankings also put Africa on the top chart of entrepreneurship across the globe.

Ok… the continent is at the top of the charts, so what?

I believe that entrepreneurship in Africa is a crucial key for the continent to unlock most of its economic potentials, while reducing unemployment and giving hope to the youth who are the next generation. So, let me tell you about a project I co-founded with my team “EverydaySolar,” which was presented at The Resolution Project Social Venture Challenge during the Baobab Summit in Ghana earlier this year.

Beforehand, we had engaged in several conversations on what give back means to us, our individual passions and how we could improve our communities back home. Soon, these conversations turned into serious web searches and field research. Through these avenues, we realized that most remote farming communities in Ghana, especially Miaso, our case study, relied heavily on the rains to irrigate their crops. Farmers in these communities also complained that even if the weather was favourable and crop yield high, they faced the challenge of not being able to sell their produce.

Middle-men from urban centers who came to these communities to trade, bought produce way cheaper than the estimated value because of their monopoly on the trade in these remote villages. Imagine all the stress farmers have to go through, right from sowing seeds to the harvest, only to have their produce bought at half the price or even sometimes less than that. Farmers who couldn’t sell their produce at the market, had to take it home, and either eat it or watch it rot. We can’t sit by and watch this cycle repeat itself every year, can we?

That is why my friends and I formed EverydaySolar. Although we are pursuing different fields of study, we have similar passions and a willingness to help each other and others to attain the best living standards possible, one solution at a time.

Currently, our main goal is to empower farmers and communities at large. We designed a solar-powered pump to readily provide farmers with water for irrigation, in order for them to produce a stable, predictable yield. We also plan to help them sell their produce when it is ready so that they can earn more money and cater for their children’s schooling. Profits from the farm produce will then be channeled to providing solar lamps for kids, to help them study at night.  In addition, through building and maintaining the solar pumps, EverydaySolar will be able to reach out to other farming communities while providing employment opportunities for the youth. We are encouraged not only by the relief and help we can provide, but by the fact that we have like-minded individuals and scholars who either want to come onboard with us or are paralleling our efforts in various sectors.

Take for instance the young female founder and CEO of Ghana Bamboo Bikes, Bernice Dapaah. She is addressing the three-fold problem of unemployment, lack of education and climate change using her bamboo bikes initiative.

Or you can consider some of our very own Scholars, like Gervase Adams at Ashesi University College, who won one of the Resolution Project Social Venture Challenge fellowship for his Komaale initiative, which promises to help young vegetable farmers in the upper west region of Ghana engage in year-rounding farming.  Or Sophie Umazi who used the “I am Kenyan campaign” and the power of photography to remind Kenyans of their common nationality despite ethnic differences after the 2007 post-election violence.

After the competition in Ghana, my team and I are still refining our project and continue striving for mentorship and funding opportunities. By mid-next year, we hope to implement a prototype of the solar powered pump and help our first client who motivated the project: the farming community of Miaso in the Eastern Region of Ghana.

Through our independent and collaborative efforts, Africa is going to experience even far more development in the years to come. The “can-do spirit” lives in us, the present generation, and we hope to create legacies for Africa’s next generation to take up. Therefore, I invite you to come on board and join us, the young entrepreneurs of Africa, as we sail to build doors where opportunity fails to knock.

Joshua Dzakah is a MasterCard Foundation Scholar pursuing his studies at the University of Toronto. He spoke at The Walrus Talks Africa’s Next Generation, a collaboration with The Walrus Foundation and the University of Toronto. Other speakers included Sylvia Mwangi, a MasterCard Foundation Scholar at the University of Toronto, as well as Alemayehu Konde Koira, Senior Program Manager, Youth Livelihoods. Watch the talks