The Courage to Think Different is what makes Heroes
Two decades ago, we were asked us to Think different. In 1997, Apple launched the “Think different” (click link for video) campaign and a series of television commercials featuring black-and-white footage of iconic 20th century personalities. Some of the personalities that appeared in the commercial: Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King, Jr., Richard Branson, John Lennon, Thomas Edison, Muhammad Ali, Ted Turner, Mohandas Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Amelia Earhart, Alfred Hitchcock, Jim Henson, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Pablo Picasso. The commercial ends with an image of a young girl opening her closed eyes, as if making a wish. It is considered the most successful campaign in the history of advertising. The commercial won numerous awards and accolades, including the 1998 Emmy Award for Best Commercial. The Think different campaign marked the beginning of Steve Job’s and Apple’s re-emergence as a powerhouse. The now famous advertising campaign celebrates those individuals who committed to an idea to change the world for the better.
Young People are Our Pride
Around the time Apple started asking us to Think different, two entrepreneurs embarked on a journey, with few resources and a lot of ideas. One was from the Netherlands and the other from India. They arrived in Zimbabwe to identify the dreams of young people. They wanted to know what was preventing young people from achieving their dreams. The answer was always the same — young people need vocational training and income generating projects to secure decent, meaningful work, including entrepreneurial pursuits. The two entrepreneurs turned this vision to action to purpose and a few months later Young Africa (YA) Zimbabwe was born. 20 years later, YA has now empowered more than 40,000 young people in the region. Along with my colleagues, Andre and Cindy, we had the privilege to spent the last weeks interacting with the founders and the central staff. They have welcomed us to YA — their life’s work. To understand YA’s purpose-driven mission of service, love, faith, responsibility and joy — we spent time at the Chitungwiza YA skills training center, interacted with students and instructors, discussed future organization goals and many insightful conversations over meals. The uniqueness of YA’s employability program is in its highly innovative franchise business model — owing to its ability to harness local resources for youth empowerment. The franchise model is an entrepreneurship promotion model. The YA center is set up as a social enterprise which provides skills training through local entrepreneurs, who assume the responsibility to train young people to be entrepreneurs or to be skilled enough to be employed by entrepreneurs. YA model has provided an efficient solution to youth employability, different from the traditional approaches which are generally failing.
Powering Opportunity through Digital Inclusion
YA is a growing organization that seeks to train 500,000 youths in southern Africa by 2025. To drive sustainable growth, new digital innovations are necessary to solve complex challenges and increase social impact. YA currently captures all data pertaining to empowering youths manually. This is a cumbersome task and leaves room for error. Furthermore, real-time information is not available and central staff are left waiting to receive data in excel sheets. With the introduction of new projects, it has become apparent that YA needs to think different — digital, mobile and cloud-based system is necessary as the organization scales. With a platform connected to the cloud, YA can monitor vital processes in their centers. They can collect real-time data allowing for better decisions making about students and programs. With new technology comes people and business process changes which are often overlooked. Over the next weeks, we hope to help accelerate YA’s “Move to Digital”, in the area of student life cycle management, to enable better monitoring and evaluation. Student life cycle management is a holistic and data-informed approach that focuses on the entire student journey — from admission through alumni — to ensure student success. Our efforts, together with YA, hopes to deliver sustainable and positive change to allow YA to continue doing amazing transformative work with the youth in the region.
If we all agree to Think different, potentially we can change the world too. More to come on this journey!
