Ghana’s Kosmos Innovation Center Wins 2018 P3 Impact Award
An announcement proceeding from the stables of the University of Virginia Darden School of Business for Business Society, Concordia and the United States Department of State’s Office of Global Partnerships, reveals that Kosmos Innovation Center in Ghana has won the fifth leg of the annual P3 Impact Award. This information was released during the 2018 Concordia Summit which was held in New York City on Thursday.
The yearly P3 Impact Awards is organized to recognize and appreciate the leading cross-sector collaborations that feature public, private, nonprofit or nongovernmental organizations addressing societal challenges.
As a public-private partnership, (P3), Kosmos Innovation Center is into the harnessing the power of tech-savvy youths to bring about innovation into priority development sectors. This is achieved by way of providing businesses with training, mentorship for entrepreneurs, and other resources for young Ghanaians looking to do business. The Center exists as a collaborative effort between DAI Global, Kosmos Energy and Ghana’s Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology. It is reported that the partnership has trained 270 youths and launched 7 new startups. Kosmos has also invested in Ghanaian youth employment and entrepreneurship in the sector of agriculture.
Kosmos Innovation Center, along with four other award finalists, was featured in a special editions P3 Impact Award article series within the Darden School’s thought-leadership publication – Darden Ideas to Action. The series features leading practices and actionable insights from the finalists and the winner. The read will as well be continually used as teaching case of development and as a material to share and advance best practices with other public-private partnerships around the world. Additionally, Kosmos Innovation Center will receive a full scholarship to attend a week-long Darden Executive Education course.
Finalists of this year’s awards include DREAMS Partnership, Griha Pravesh, Lake Kivu Coffee Alliance, and MIP Futuro.
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KIC, which is now in its third year, has an incubation program that provides annual cohorts of around 100 Ghanaian youths with business training, mentorship and market research tours. After nine months of intensive learning and prototype development, the entrepreneurs pitch to receive seed funding worth USD 50 K and spend the next year in the MEST incubator to work on their concepts, developing them into fully-fledged businesses. Since 2016, along with training 270 entrepreneurs, KIC has invested a total of USD 250 K and leveraged additional USD 450 K in seed funding and growth capital investment from external funders.
Startups that have benefited from KIC’s funding initiatives include Trotro Tractor, AgroInnova, QualiTrace, and AgroCenta.
Image Credit: DAI
