New York, April 29, 2020 — Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator, which builds African solutions to tackle the global challenge of youth unemployment, received an honourable mention at yesterday’s Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas Awards, announced in New York.

World Changing Ideas honours businesses, policies, projects, and concepts that are driving change in the world. “There seems no better time to recognise organisations that are using their ingenuity, resources, and, in some cases, their scale to tackle society’s biggest problems,” says Stephanie Mehta, editor-in-chief of Fast Company. “We have uncovered some of the smartest and most inspiring projects of the year.”

Harambee received an honourable mention in the category of products designed for the bottom of the pyramid and those intended to help create leapfrog innovation. This was for Harambee.mobi, its free-to-join online multi-channel platform, which has supported a growing network of 800,000 young people with employability skills and job-seeking. This platform – which was originally designed to serve hard-to-reach youth – has been expanded to support Covid response efforts, from a large-scale campaign to provide 3 million youth with trusted and accurate information at a time many young people are drowning in fake news to supporting government in expanding its channels of communication beyond face-to-face citizen services.

“This recognition for Harambee’s technology platform comes at a time when we are increasing support for our partners in government and the private sector,” says Harambee CEO, Maryana Iskander. “We are focused on the rapid scale up of more channels of support on the platform to help young people at a time when they most need it.”

Winners were selected from more than 3,000 global entries. “The honourees we have selected represent a hope that we can respond to other crises facing humanity in the same ways the world is coming together to fight the coronavirus” added senior editor Morgan Clendaniel.

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About the World Changing Ideas Awards: World Changing Ideas is one of Fast Company’s major annual awards programs and is focused on social good, seeking to elevate products and concepts that make the world better. A panel of judges from across sectors choose winners, finalists, and honourable mentions based on feasibility and the potential for impact. With a goal of awarding ingenuity and fostering innovation, Fast Company draws attention to ideas with great potential and helps them expand their reach to inspire more people to start working on solving the problems that affect us all.