Читать книгу Impact the World - Carrie Rich - Страница 12

Evolving into a citizen statesperson often starts at a local level, solving problems for local people. In some cases, this kind of service can manifest a form of training; an opportunity to become educated as a leader while positioning yourself to make a unique and outsized impact. Local service also teaches you how to find the heart of a challenge—to get as close as possible to decision‐makers and stakeholders to design solutions and make a difference. From there, you can build awareness about an issue by engaging media or by protesting injustice. You can meet concerned individuals and put people and powerbrokers in the same room. If you can make an impact in your neighborhood, you can look outward to similar challenges that impact larger communities and affect broader populations; scale your service outward to apply your knowledge to more expansive issues.

This kind of outward progression isn't theoretical. It's real.

As a young person in Nigeria, Mene Blessing witnessed the challenges facing agricultural workers on the continent. With 80 percent of smallholder farmers in Africa subsisting on an income of less than $2 a day, meeting the high cost of food for poultry and livestock is often a challenge. His personal experience led him to set up Unorthodox Feeds Innovation for Rural Enterprising Smallholder Farmers, or UNFIRE—a program that provides farmers with feed costing 60 percent less than regular options, enabling farmers to increase their output and their incomes by as much as 80 percent. Produced from agricultural waste, such as mango seed kernels, elephant grass, maize, and cassava waste from milling plants, UNFIRE's feed is unique, culturally acceptable, and suitable for a range of poultry and livestock. It's sustainably produced, too, with UNFIRE operating a community‐based, self‐supportive model. Local youth groups are engaged in the collection of fair‐trade raw materials that are purchased by UNFIRE, and rural women are recruited, trained, and empowered to run their own businesses as vendors, supplying and selling the feed within their own communities. The model was designed to benefit both farmers and their communities.

The program worked. During Mene's pilot, some 58 tons of mango seed waste was recovered and used by UNFIRE teams as part of a partnership with JA Farms in Nigeria. During an 18‐month pilot program, 5,000 consumers benefited. Twenty‐seven young people were engaged to help collect raw materials and 10 women vendors were employed to sell the seed. Each of these vendors, who were previously unemployed, generated the equivalent of local minimum wage. More than 14 million grams of livestock products were produced over the 18‐month period, including 45,000 eggs and 3,070 chickens.

Mene didn't stop there. Instead, he built his work further, and went on to co‐found and become COO of Vetsark, a data science social enterprise working to help predict and prevent disease and pest outbreaks in Nigeria. He used his success to help develop other citizen‐statespeople; in 2016, he co‐founded Inspire Africa—a Pan‐African institution designed to transform the careers and life trajectories of a new generation of leaders and entrepreneurs in Africa by delivering high‐impact entrepreneurship and leadership education to African youth. Against the backdrop of Nigeria's 58.1 percent youth unemployment rate, Inspire Africa trained 3,000 young people, helped fund more than 120 business ventures, and created more than 300 jobs.

Mene was not groomed into office by a political patron. He wasn't given a public platform by a well‐heeled relative. Instead, Mene harnessed his ability to make an impact by using his values and skills to build a coalition for change. He appointed himself to solve hunger in Africa, helping to support farmers and consumers alike. Then he appointed himself to address the education to employment gap, enabling young peers to compete in today's evolving markets and ensuring that talent does not remain on the sideline. Mene's journey is just beginning; as a citizen‐statesperson, Mene is still looking for ways to expand impact outward, to develop effective solutions, and to fuel ever‐larger change.

That's how an individual can use local knowledge to make a global impact. For people around the world, that's how one citizen statesperson's leadership can change lives and set a new course for the future. That's the power of a citizen‐statesperson.