Portrait of a GroundBreaker: Emmanuel Leslie Addae

GroundBreakers is delighted to feature Emmanuel Leslie Addae, the Founder of Africa Internship Academy and TalentsinAfrica.com, on our Portraits of a GroundBreaker Series.

Emmanuel Leslie Addae is the Founder of the Africa Internship Academy and TalentsinAfrica.com. In 2017, he was named the Social Entrepreneur of the Year in Ghana. Addae got his start in curating Ghana’s first-ever TEDx Conference, and has been steadily scaling his impact through founding social enterprises that target youth unemployment throughout Ghana and other African countries. His Africa Internship Academy is equipping students with the professional skills and connections they need to succeed in the rapidly changing world of work. On this week’s feature of GroundBreaker’s Portraits of a GroundBreaker Series, our discussion with Leslie ranged from the social entrepreneurship scene in Accra to how his mother always knew he would become a social entrepreneur.

Read on to learn more about this GroundBreaker’s inspiring work and be sure to check out the Africa Internship Academy and TalentsinAfrica.com!

What inspired you to start AIA?

I have been very active with volunteerism and so I work with a lot of volunteers in my daily work. Anytime I worked with volunteers I realized they lack a lot of soft skills. I was then thinking that there should be an institution that is responsible for training and growing these young people. That’s why I started Africa Internship Academy — to support and also to groom more young Africans.

How strong is the social entrepreneurship scene in Accra? Where do you see it heading?

Ghanaians now understand the idea of social enterprise and one institution that has championed social enterprise in Ghana is the British Council. Last year the British Council was able to do a study of every social enterprise in Ghana and found out 80% were being run by women. To me there’s a clear link there: if women are leading the social enterprises then we should expect more change in our country.

What is your vision for AIA?

We just launched the talents community TalentsinAfrica because we realized that many young people are looking for a place to put their business profile and recruiters are looking for a database where they can search for talent. We just launched it as part of the AIA initiative and are networking hard to get ready to open platforms for Nigeria, Rwanda, Kenya, Cote d’Ivoire and Senegal. We are working through universities, such as the the final year students at the University of Ghana to help them create their profiles before they leave school and start looking for a job.

How have you been able to build such a strong network of involvement with AIA in the public, private, and civil society sectors within Ghana?

We currently have over 50 host organizations who have signed up to our program. We’re still building this network but have been able to recruit these many different organizations into our network. We want to get more arms in Ghana before expanding to nearby countries to achieve our long-term goal of building a pan-African network.

“If women are leading the social enterprises then we should expect more change in our country.”

Could you speak more about your work with Ghana’s National Service Scheme?

In Ghana, the National Service Scheme is a mandated program that every student goes through after graduating from university. After recruitment, the government then posts them to different agencies and institutions and they start working. About a year after we started the Africa Internship Academy, we realized that many institutions sensed the need for our program, and so the National Service Scheme called us to say that they think our work-integrated learning module should be mandatory for young people. Because this program is so large, we couldn’t engage and train over 50,000 youth for the National Service Scheme at once. What we then had to do was compress our programs to the best two models and then travel across the country and deliver the model to these young students who were about to start their national service.

Why did you decide to get involved with TEDx?

TEDx was the launchpad for my entrepreneurship journey. I left university in 2009 and started my first job in 2010. In 2011 I was laid off and that is when I started re-imagining myself. I asked myself, “Why don’t I start something to help solve problems in our country?” I used to listen to a lot of TED talks and understood how we could organize an event in my country. My first TED event was in 2014 and, to my surprise, it went viral. I soon got a scholarship to be part of TED Global and that was the launchpad for me as a social entrepreneur.

What is the demand for young people in Ghana want to become social entrepreneurs?

Many people understand social entrepreneurship and there are many programs in our country. The best way to solve social problems is through social enterprises and to be a social entrepreneur. Many people are now going into that because of the social problems we have in our country.

I happen to be part of a network called Social Enterprise Ghana, which is a consortium and member organization of all social enterprises in Ghana. Our outreach through that group has been to educate more Ghanaians that the way to solve youth unemployment is through venturing a social enterprise. We are working hard to get a law passed in Ghana so that all of this will be included in the curriculum in our universities.

“Many people [in Ghana] understand social entrepreneurship…and that the best way to solve social problems is through social enterprises and to be a social entrepreneur.”

What are your thoughts on the future of employment and the demographic dividend in Ghana?

Every year, more than 200,000 young people graduate from universities. Only a small percent of them are able to find work in the first year after graduating from school, so there is a big need for job opportunities. We have to quickly adapt to the change that is coming and some jobs will lose relevance with the changing nature of work. There is certainly a possibility of young people learning fast and acquiring more skills to meet the demand and need for the future of work on our continent.

Who are some of the people who inspire you in your work?

Fred Swaniker is someone who has inspired me a lot to do what I am doing now. Fred is a Ghanaian entrepreneur who founded the African Leadership Academy (ALA) which is a social enterprise developing the continent’s next generation of leaders. ALA is focused on addressing the symptoms of poor leadership in Africa and is working to develop a powerful network of extraordinary young people well-equipped to address the root causes of their countries’ biggest social problems.

Did you always see yourself as a social entrepreneur?

No, I didn’t see myself as an entrepreneur when I was growing up. My mom ran a series of businesses while simultaneously working other jobs. I learned a lot about entrepreneurship from her. My mom is not surprised at what I’m doing now because of the way I used to live my life when I was young. She likes to tell the story about the shop we had in our house, and coming home one day and realizing that I had moved everything in the shop. I had brought out my TV game into the shop , put out some chairs, and was charging people to play the game. My mom was surprised to see the entrepreneurship in me at a young age, even before I knew what entrepreneurship was.