Nurturing Female Entrepreneurship
How to Prepare Women for Careers in Industries that Don’t Exist Yet
At Akilah, we‘re changing the way women participate in the economy as inventors, innovators, technologists, and more. Innovation and entrepreneurship are in the DNA of everything we teach. We provide competency-based, skills-first training in areas like information systems and business management — and we help women gain the confidence to think like entrepreneurs.
But according to a February report by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office:
“Gains in female participation in science and engineering occupations and entrepreneurship are not leading to broad increases in female patent inventors.”
Ami Patel Shah’s article on Knowledge@Wharton explores this phenomenon in depth, and she suggests a “patent new deal” for female inventors to encourage the funding, support, and realization of women’s solutions.
The ability to picture one’s self as an entrepreneur has been a hurdle for women’s success as inventors and entrepreneurs in the past. In the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Sylvia Acevedo writes about why we need to nurture female entrepreneurship — from as young an age as possible:
“The young girls of today are preparing for careers in industries that have not yet been invented. We need them to have the courage and the confidence — along with the business acumen and technology skills — to create the solutions that are remaking our world.”
At Akilah, we do more than encourage entrepreneurship and teach business skills. We offer hands-on opportunities for women to ideate, create, and pitch their inventions or business ideas in the real world. For starters, we have created the Akilah Business Incubation Center, where students and alumnae receive coaching to grow their businesses. (Read more about the Business Incubation Center here.)
Akilah has cultivated creators like Sandrine Sangwa, who developed an app to help hearing-impaired people communicate by phone. Sandrine says Akilah played an important role in helping her build the app.
“I learned Java, PHP, and how to build mobile applications at Akilah,” she says. “I combined all of those skills and came up with my application.”
The Information Systems faculty at Akilah also provided guidance on implementing Sandrine’s app and building the user interface.
At global innovators’ conferences like the Hult Prize competition, Akilah students presented a range of innovations, from developing a digital referral system for hospitals in Rwanda to using old car batteries and household waste to create energy.
There’s also the recent invention of three Akilah students, Marie Rose Mushimiyimana, Marie Aline Iraguha, and Delphine Ihirwe, who took on an issue close to home: food production in Rwanda. The students developed a hydroponic gardening system that allows people to grow vegetables without access to land. By collaborating with Ignite Solar, the fastest growing Pan-African developer of off-grid energy solutions, they were able to set up their first functioning hydroponics system and launch their business.
Akilah students are constantly creating new, viable products and business ideas that are transforming the local and global economy. Our students are actively building a future where women are not only ready to fill jobs in STEM and business, but ready to create them as well.