Iringa showing off her fast growing innovation ecosystem
Iringa is Nationally identified as the home of education. For the past decade, The region has been famous for a number of higher learning educational institutions such as Ruaha college University, University of Iringa (formerly Tumaini University college), The Open University of Tanzania, Mkwawa University college and even the Community development training center (CDTI).
What a list!
With all these educational institutions, there is still hardly enough challenges that are tackled. There is hardly enough that is been done to reach the problems of the community at grass root level.
Thanks to the ammeters who are the real innovators, Iringa is slowly growing into a rich majority of innovators. These pioneers were bold and crazy enough to start with what they had and with what they were able to do. spontaneously they built the concept and culture of innovation and entrepreneurial mindset to youth and people of the community at large.
Rlabs is the frontier of innovation in Iringa. It started in 2012, operating from different buildings with just a handful of youth, and later turned into a strong living lab that has reached and changed lives of many youth within Iringa. Rlabs, a short form for Reconstructed living lab managed by Yusuf ssessanga and Arnold luwahgo strongly believes in making hope contagious.
Rlabs is objective about bringing hope to the community. To allow youth who do not believe in themselves to start being confident in their own skin by empowering them to use their mind to challenge and think critically as they find opportunities in every challenge they face. The living lab has and is still doing all of this with innovation at the heart of all operations.
Youth are trained to think differently, to challenge their mind to think bigger and to always avoid being normal.
Since the genesis of Rlabs, Iringa has expirienced the massive growth of a startup that has now turned to a fast growing company that ensures a clean environment and using innovation to tackle the problems and challenges within the community. The Envibright company, founded by Paul Myovela, is a company that uses bottles for bricks to build different structures. It has now ventured into other areas like providing cleaning services by recycling the dirt and at the moment, Envibright has opened a a restaurant, disrupting what normal should look like in the industry of hotel management.
Iringa also has Kiota Hub. The hub located within the University of Iringa. The beautiful thing about the innovation ecosystem in Iringa is that even the higher learning educations are involved. They see and understand the value of innovation within their community. It is exciting. The future looks promising to the youth in Iringa.
Kiota hub was officially launched in Iringa November 2016. The hub operates under the center of entrepreneurship and innovation that is within the University.
Kiota’s part in the ecosystem lies on the devastating numbers that show the bitter truth of the unemployment rate in the country. About 80% of graduates do not get employment every year.
when this army of graduates fails to land a job, they take entrepreneurship as a fall back option. At a point the people in the employment industry complain that the graduates do have good grades in their certificates, but there are not relevant to what they are looking for.
Such a situation reflects an insightful challenge. There is lack of skills; employ-ability skills and business skills. So, Kiota hub is designed to bridge this gap by providing employ-ability skills and business skills. Kiota works with the community, University students and graduates to help them develop either employ-ability skills or business skills. Giving youth a rich exposure to various insights and information that will foster their growth.
With such a structure, Kiota works as an open space therefore that fosters mindset growth, encourages co creation and creates an atmosphere of networking. This essence reflects the overall activities such as master class, start your start-up training programs, the inest connect event and other many more.
And then the other most intriguing fact about the innovation ecosystem in Iringa is that there is a component of arts. Across humanity and all of history, Art is the best approach to reach out and speak to the hearts of youth.
Youth are exposed to a lot of wrong information. Especially about sex and the reproductive health in general. And anyone that approaches youth with the topic of sexual reproductive health in mind is really an enemy to these youth. They avoid it and they do not want to open up.
The challenge is still true with the guardians and parents. Altogether, they avoid talking about such things with their children and it has thus built a chain of illiteracy especially on the subject of sexual reproductive health.
The Mkwawa community art space is an open space for the youth. It is filled with artisans on the fields of music, drawings, drama and dancing. It includes all the areas that youth find mesmerizing.
And as it capitalizes in building and empowering youth with professional artistic skills, it also uses the platform to share with youth about major insights on sexual reproductive health.
What an innovation!
The Mkwawa community Art space is a result of the Amua project that was implemented by the Sahara Ventures in collaboration with the UNFPA. Mkwawa art space emerged among the 4 major champions in 2017
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