I watched Meghan’s presentation at MIT Scaling Development Ventures conference in 2017, an event hosted by MIT D-Lab to bring social entrepreneurs and supporters together to make a more equitable world. I liked her energy and loved the name and mission of Dare to Innovate through entrepreneurship to end unemployment in Africa. I reached out to Meghan and we kept in touch since…
The story started in 2012 with seven Peace Corps volunteers in Guinea. Their services changed their own lives as well as 21 young Guineans’ and gave birth to Dare to Innovate (DTI), a youth-led movement to design and jump-start African social enterprises to build African products for African markets. Since 2014, DTI has trained 8000 youth in entrepreneurship; the graduates from the accelerator started 60 business (active today) which created 450 jobs and received $400k seed funding.
In 2017, Meghan co-founded OZE, a business coach in your pocket, using data to help small and medium businesses grow and access credit in Africa. Currently, OZE business app is used by X entrepreneurs in Ghana and Nigeria (# to come).
I admire Meghan’s mission and thoughtful design to solve the massive youth unemployment problem* with Dare to Innovate addressing the knowledge transfer while OZE focusing on the resource access. As Meghan said “The challenge that I think we need to solve is how do we support the growth of the more than 100M small businesses in Africa that are “non-employers” meaning they don’t pay a single consistent salary. If we want to solve the massive problem of youth unemployment and underemployment, I think this is a great place to start.” Yes and best wish to Maghan and the dare innovators/ builders!
*according to DTI, 120 million youth, between age of 15 and 24 are unemployed and 13 million more are expected to enter the job market in the next 10 years.