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YINNOH was born out of a refugee and marginalized pain.
The Yinnoh Founding team consists of Fidel Nelson Kasaranga, Magamba Micheal and Benjamin Abunuasi,
Due to severe social and environmental instability in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Benjamin Abunuasi was forced to flee from his home country Dr-congo of as a refugee to neighboring Uganda in 2017 where he searched for any form of employment as means to survival, and also tried his utmost to find any form of resettlement; both without success which grew on the frustrating and stressful situation to him and he quickly started to realize that the greater majority of refugees were facing similar, and young refugees were unable to find employment due to extremely high youth unemployment in Uganda.
Benjamin realized that there was an opportunity to create platforms and spaces for refugees to be empowered and to realize their potential as learners, entrepreneurs, and even job creators. He joined the social innovation academy SINA in Uganda in later 2018 to learn more about entrepreneurship, mentoring, life coaching, and other vocation training through organizational responsibility/role filling, with an aim to provide solutions to his community problems and founded YINNOH, the Youth Innovation Hub.
During the onboarding, a joint acquaintance, Nelson Kasaranga Fidel a fellow refugee born in Dr-congo, and Magamba Michael a Ugandan by nationality came on board as Co-Founders, both have been scholars in SINA, having passion about empowering refugees and other young people as shared the same stories.
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In 2020, the Yinnoh team spent time doing the validation of the idea and making sure the provided solution responds to the right challenge. the validation process happened through several workshops and other Hackathons, which was the first online hackathon #SmarterThanCorona to identify solutions for the Covid-19 Crisis in Rwamwanja Refugee Camp, which happened in April and was funded by SINA.
The goal of the hackathon was to identify solutions specifically from refugees for refugees, train refugees on entrepreneurial skills, and change the mindset from hopelessness to being able to get active and do something to fight the crisis. We managed to engage 24 participants that came up with ideas to tackle the crisis. A panel of judges evaluated and selected a winning idea that tries to solve the issue of the food supply in the camp during the crisis. The 1 min video pitch gives a glimpse into the outcome of the hackathon: https://www.facebook.com/YINNOH/videos/751499035615179
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