Innovate Salone, an independently funded initiative by Global Minimum Inc and well wishers is changing lives in Sierra Leone by organizing innovation competitions and helping the budding entrepreneurs build their ideas into businesses in Sierra Leone.
According to Innovative Salon, “By empowering secondary school students with the creative freedom to design their future, we lay the bedrock for national development.’
The initiative establishes a platform for creation through a competition, provide mentorship for youth and supporting the network of its innovators. The Innovate Salone Competition aims at helping young students in Sierra Leone to see their ideas come true.
The initiative aims at identifying and supporting local innovative solutions in Health, Energy, Education, Agriculture, Transportation, Telecommunications, Civic Media, and Engineering in Sierra Leone. The competition gives up to U$1,500 to top student teams to help them build their solutions. GMin gives mentorship to the teams that apply. The mentors are professionals from Harvard, MIT, Sierra Leone. Innovate Salone is a with an aim to nurture and harvest the creative and innovative minds of Sierra Leoneans through design and implementation.
Innovate Salone is dedicated to improving the quality of life in Sierra Leone through the collaborative integration of scientific, socio-cultural, technological and entrepreneurial innovations. Through networks of businesses, academic institutions, and public private partnerships both within and outside Sierra Leone, Innovate Salone will continue to support teams with solutions that have the potential to create impact in domains including Health, Energy, Education, Agriculture, Transportation, Telecommunications, Civic Media, and Engineering.
This year, Innovate Salone worked with over 300 secondary students who successfully developed their prototypes. including Kelvin Doe who build his own radio station using locally available materials. 70 other applications were developed for solutions in Health, Energy and Education were submitted from seven districts in Sierra Leone.
Innovate Salone 2013 wants to empower more youths and support even more innovative solutions by organizing Half-a-day hackathons: to help students in design thinking and problem solving using local materials, prototype development, creating a network of supportive mentors, 3 day Summer Innovation Camps for finalist teams to share their inventions and develop their critical thinking and collaboration skills and support other Innovate Competitions across the world like in Detroit, to Kingston and Lusaka.
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