Support for innovators
When was the last time you had a big idea? Not like figuring out how to tie your shoe laces, but something you thought would make life easier, more comfortable, or more fun for everyone. Think about the simple innovations like clay-lined cook stoves that consume less fuel wood or the ingenious tippy-tap found in many places in Ghana. It just uses a piece of string, wood, and a small container for washing hands with soap and water safely, helping people to stay healthy.
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Perhaps you have an innovative idea but you don’t have the drive, courage or resources to make it happen? Most big ideas start small and are brought to life by taking initiative with support from people who believe in ideas. This is much needed in Ghana, and there are ways to get support.
Ghana’s need for innovators is pressing. This country’s main capital are its more than 12 million children. Their health, education, happiness and well-being are the cornerstones upon which the future of Ghana rests. And yet their situation suggests otherwise.
Every 15 minutes, a newborn baby dies in Ghana. Twenty-three per cent of children are chronically malnourished, that’s almost three million people suffering. Almost 500,000 children aged between 6 and 14 years are out of school. Nearly a quarter of Ghana’s population practise open defecation, putting them at risk of potentially deadly diarrhoeal diseases such as cholera.
These and many other challenges faced by Ghanaian children do not require radically new or different solutions. Change is often incremental and most “new” technologies are really combinations and modifications of existing, independent ideas. Innovating means ‘tweaking’.
Steve Jobs, an outstanding innovator of the recent past, is a good example of a ‘tweaker’. He started off as a barefoot student who returned coke bottles for food money and never graduated from college, but later went on to found and lead Apple the company that would revolutionise an entire industry. His visions did not come from thin air. He modified and combined independent ideas from different fields: communication, mobile technology, arts, and aesthetics.
Africa is full of such tweakers. In Burundi, discarded oil barrels are being recrafted into durable computer and internet terminals for remote schools. In Malawi, pregnant women across the country use their cheap mobile phones to access information about how to stay healthy during pregnancy and when to see a doctor. In Uganda, around 300,000 young people regularly use the SMS platform ‘U-Report’ to share their concerns with decision makers, giving a voice to those who often go unheard.
In Ghana, innovators have also taken the stage, and we can do more to support them. UNICEF, together with its partners Reach for Change and the European Union, has launched ‘I Imagine Ghana’, a social innovators challenge. Applications can be submitted online at www.reachforchange.org/iimagineghana until March 31, 2015. Many applications have already been received, and we especially need more innovators in the water, sanitation and hygiene field to come forward and apply.
Up to 10 winners will be competitively selected to receive start-up funding and mentoring from experts to help their impactful ideas to grow. And there are other initiatives like ours available to Ghanaian innovators.
Bringing ideas to life, to test them and make them available needs investment of knowledge, time, and money. Innovators need to recover costs. It can be the first decisive hurdle to find the cash to get started with an idea.
The good news is that people seem willing to pay for solutions that really matter to them: goods or services that make a real perceivable difference in their lives. Therefore, innovations need to be designed with scale and sustainability in mind, which are also key selection criteria for the ‘I Imagine Ghana’ social innovators challenge.
Innovation is human. Innovation is a process of trying, combining, failing, trying again. It is an ongoing process that may start with a hunch, a small idea. Most of us don’t stick to it, will not think it through and get demotivated. But we need ‘tweakers’ who go all the way: driven individuals taking initiative to develop practical solutions to real world problems, using existing means available to them. It could be you.