Yaw Adu-Gyamfi, Executive Board Chairman, HOPin Academy
An innovation center to help harness and train more youth with brilliant in entrepreneurship for economic growth has been opened in Tamale, The Northern regional capital.
The initiative of HOPin Academy, an innovation hub located in Tamale is to bring together innovators, startup founders, development practitioners, researchers, and entrepreneurs who are poised to apply sustainably and innovative solutions to building skills, creating jobs and providing development solutions.
The facility has a research and learning space, a recreational center, comfortable meeting rooms, a playing ground for children, co-working space with high-speed internet for innovators, startups, and partners among others.
The Academy since its inception in 2013 in the Metropolis has partnered with over 30 renowned corporate institutions and successfully nurtured over 50 startups as well as seen over a hundred community events effectively carried out to bring about development in its operational areas.
Speaking at the ceremony in Tamale, Yaw Adu-Gyamfi, the Executive Board Chairman for HOPin Academy commended the organization for the initiative to build up business ideas to create more jobs to curb the unemployment rates among the youths.
“We are in an era where private entities like HOPin Academy redefines the narrative on what it will take to empower young people in the Northern Region. This narrative will be based on innovation, digital technologies, entrepreneurship, and sports and how these combine effectively to create jobs and wealth” he said.
According to him, there have been a lot of disruptions that call for a radical approach in pushing entrepreneurship, innovation, and digital technologies to the front burner to open up new opportunities and importantly create jobs.
“Industries all around us are now being significantly disrupted and forced to re-invent themselves, both in structure and attitude. The mix of rapid changes in technology, changing consumer demands, the advent of new ways to provide development solutions, changing community values, changing demographics - and in particular the growth in millennials - are all factors driving industry disruption at an unprecedented rate and thankfully, HOPin Academy is at the forefront of this changing dynamics” he said.
He noted that the government welcomes private sector initiatives and eager to work with all in creating an enabling environment for technology, innovation, and sustainable solutions for development to thrive.
MacCarthy Mac-Gbathy, HOPin Executive Director said the Academy, from a humble beginning, has consistently developed strategies and programs that provide young people opportunities to enhance their skills, start and incubate their businesses and provide innovative and entrepreneurial solutions to addressing the developmental challenges here in the Northern region.
HOPin Academy’s business model as part of our overall strategy as a social enterprise is that we reinvest profits made through business and collaborative projects in empowering young people to realize their potential by providing a space for learning, idea generation, and development of a startup entrepreneurial Eco-system as means of contributing to sustainable development in northern Ghana he explained.
He said the organization is committed to engaging the academia, government, private sector, and traditional authorities in this shared vision and goal as a great starting point to creating value and more especially, jobs for young people and sustainable development solutions.
“We introduce a new and innovative approach to empowering young people and providing entrepreneurial and technology-backed solutions. Subsequently, we look forward with considerable enthusiasm to work with the Government, academia, traditional authorities, the private sector, and the range of other business and community stakeholders on the challenges and prospects that lie before us in implementing our shared vision”.
