July 3 – 28, 2017 – 22 college graduates from 15 countries across Africa participated in the first edition of 10Academy. Organized by Infinite Potentials Consulting (IPC), the focus of the fully funded program was to identify, train and launch high potential young African graduates into careers where they have the opportunity to create impact.
In partnership with Ashesi, IPC leveraged expertise and support from leading members of the scientific community including representatives of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, UNESCO and the University of Cape Town, among others to pull off 10academy.
“There are good ideas out there to transform the continent; what’s lacking is builders,” explained Arun Sharma, IPC founder and team lead. “Our focus for 10Academy is to find and train people who have the intelligence, work ethic and creativity to take up and implement some of these great ideas themselves. Also, now is the right time because technology makes things easier, whatever you want to do is easier now than has ever been. So by finding these young people, by giving them skills and access to technology and by connecting them to opportunities, we believe that they can start to drive the transformation that the continent needs.”
The program was divided into two parts; the first, an intensive, residential course, hosted at Ashesi’s campus in Ghana, and the second, a 6-month paid internship in the private sector.
Over the month-long program at Ashesi, participants covered modern skills including design thinking, big data analysis, entrepreneurship, management and programming among others. The goal of this phase was to give participants the opportunity to put the mix of their skills into practice, through identifying a major challenge in Africa and, in a small group, developing potentially implementable solutions within the month-long period.
Following their residential course, the 10Academy fellows will take up a 6-month paid internship in the private sector, where hiring companies will look to them to deliver innovative and transformative projects that will challenge them and impact those industries.
“The opportunity to be in a new environment, meet new people and learn about them and their cultures, and the opportunity to challenge myself was why I signed up for 10academy,” said Muzammil Aubeeluck, graduate of the University of Mauritius. “Over the course of the month, I’ve been introduced to new technologies and learned how to communicate and build solutions that cater to problems.”
