INNOVATION May-June 2014

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AfriLEAD team photo: (Left to right) Munira, Ezekiel, Colleen, Fayada and Peter.

Re-imagining Education with AfriLEAD Institute Colleen O’Toole, P.Eng.

W hen I was asked to write an article about my recent Professional Fellowship with Engineers Without Borders (EWB) in Tamale, Ghana, I was reluctant. I didn’t want to become part of a tradition in the West of “telling stories about Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives, of difference, of darkness.” But as Chimamanda Adichie speaks about in The Danger of a Single Story , “there are other stories that are not about catastrophe, and it is very important, it is just as important, to talk about them.” I chose a career in environmental engineering because I saw a space to integrate my love of nature, building things and support- ing opportunity development for those who by happenstance were born into poverty. I wanted to disrupt the structures that prevent- ed people from having access to basic human needs. It’s no secret that development efforts in African countries have failed to achieve their potential of creating widespread, meaningful change for people living in poverty. It was very obvious from four months in Tamale that NGOs are pervasive and some have become entrenched in decision-making and structures that provide and maintain basic services and facilities in areas of education, health, sanitation and other social amenities.

EWB’s approach is different. EWB Canada invests in ventures that will drive radical systemic innovations. As an organization, EWB works to spark and accelerate the development and growth of these ventures, building capacity and resiliency to ensure their long-term independence and sustainability long after the venture exits EWB’s incubator. For my fellowship, I was partnered with AfriLEAD Institute. Founded in 2009 by Peter Awin, AfriLEAD is a leadership and social enterprise development venture based in Ghana. AfriLEAD works within the education sector to attract, enable and engage young people as leaders in social change. Peter was born in Ghana and has always had the desire to be a successful entrepreneur. With the country’s unemployment rate presently at 12.9% (though for youth between the ages of 15 and 24, unemployment sits at 60%), AfriLEAD’s mission is to engage the next generation of African leaders and entrepreneurs to contribute innovatively and constructively to the development of African communities. My role during the fellowship was to support Peter as he developed a new model to provide education to potential entrepreneurs. With my Ghanaian colleagues, we mapped the curriculum for courses in high schools and selected

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