Educate Ethical and Innovative Leaders for Africa

Over the past year, Ashesi’s campus has grown into a hotbed for startups. There’s a late-night food delivery service, an out-of-school education program, a social enterprise aimed at helping children with neurological disorders, and over ten other startups created by freshmen as part of their Foundations for Design and Entrepreneurship (FDE) class. The new year-long course equips students to use design thinking to solve problems, and then create businesses out of those solutions. In the first semester, students strengthen their problem solving and critical thinking skills. In the second semester, they conceptualize and launch their own startups.

“For developing new ideas, we take students through the design thinking process where we teach them to take a system’s perspective to problems (a bird’s eye view); to not resort to their biases but rather be user-centered in tackling problems so they can develop solutions from deep empathy; and to aim for creative and unique outputs” explains FDE Professor Gordon Adomdza. “For applying their ideas, we teach students to test, test, test, until they get it right. Student teams have developed a non-electric hair drying head wrap, an activated charcoal product to reduce odor in the fridge, and a social platform to engage junior high school students. Reading through their reflection papers after just one semester, it was clear that the process of slowing down and taking a system’s perspective to problems was beginning to change the perspectives of many students. Our colleagues teaching other classes have shared their observations of how refreshingly different this current class of students is. We have developed a nice invention, but we need to continue making creative adaptations, in order to sustain these efforts at innovation.”

Through the entrepreneurial journey students take, Professor Adomdza hopes that the course will inspire a lifelong passion for entrepreneurism in many students. Assistant Professor Sena Agyepong envisions that FDE will have an impact far beyond the Ashesi campus. “We expect to see more collaboration between students from different majors, launching ventures that will start some very impactful change in the country and across the continent. And we think FDE is a very useful tool to get them started.”