When Harry And I Took To The 2017 Nneka World Changers Summer Camp

On 7^th August, 2017, I had the privilege to impart nearly 1,000 participants during the Nneka World Changers Summer Camp 2017, organised by the prestigious Nneka Youth Foundation. The session on “Creativity and Problem Solving” was jointly facilitated Harry Akligoh (a biomedical scientist and STEAM enthusiast), and my good self. The opportunity was brought about due to the vision of Gameli Adzaho, a STEAM (Science, Technology, Education, Africa, Media) pacesetter and founder of Global Lab Ghana, to add more community action to the online oriented GlobalLab Ghana.

Co facilitator, Harry Akligoh

Overview of Nneka Youth Foundation

Nneka Youth Foundation is a Ghanaian based non- profit organisation founded by Mad. Cecilia Fiaka in 2012. It has served 9,000+ youth rural Ghana since its inception. Nneka offers education, enrichment, and life building opportunities for the young.

A signature project of the foundation is the annual Nneka World Changers Summer Camp. This year’s edition was held at the Nneka Youth Development Centre, Ve Agbome in the Volta Region. the camp begun on 30^th of July and ends on the 25^th of August.

Four different batches of participants make up the camp. It runs from Monday to Friday, and another group of participants come in for the next week. Thus, the camp lasts for four weeks, and trains four different batches of participants. About 1,000 participants make up each group.

The summer camp comprises of educative and exciting activities like educative talks from different professional fields, interactive group discussions, arts and crafts, in-door and out-door games, group challenges, reading and spelling bee, talent shows and many more.

Presentation highlights

Our 4-hour demonstration was aimed at equipping the participants with skills of that would enable them confront daily problems they encounter, and devise solutions to them. My counterpart, Harry took the students through the powerpoint presentation. He touched on social impact, and its importance to society. 

Also, he comprehensively tutored the audience on the creative way of solving problems using design thinking model. The design thinking model consists of three main components: understating, exploring, and materialising.

Afterwards, l steered the audience to watch videos of two adolescents who have adopted innovative means of solving problems in society. Kelvin Doe AKA DJ Focus and Richard Turere have received international attention by building radio transmitter and farm defence mechanism respectively. 

In addition, a seven bullet question was discussed with the students on the inspirations they have taken from the videos, and how they can also come up with their own ideas to address challenges in their various communities. The campers came up with intriguing responses.

Furthermore, to seal the knowledge we passed unto the audience, each group was tasked to identify common problems in their respective communities, and solve them using the approach we taught them.

Before we departed, we left the supervision of the project in the hands of the teachers in the camp. We are optimistic that these young ones will return to their various communities, and begin implementing solutions.