Youth innovation hub-yinnoh

About us

Benjamin Abunuasi is Congolese by birth. A university graduate in social sciences became a refugee in Uganda in 2017 following natural disasters and political insecurities in his country of DRC-CONGO. He survived on $1 per day making 500 adobe bricks per full day for three months upon which he was hospitalized. Following dark circumstances upon suffering trauma during his migration journey, he after got the opportunity to join an entrepreneurship scholarship at the Social Innovation Academy SINA. He rose to turn his life around to become a resolute changemaker, working hands-on to build refugee communities. As a result, he founded YINNOH (Youth Innovation Hub) to empower refugee and marginalized youth from the host community as job creators and innovators providing them with the ability to turn their challenges into realizing dreams of creating opportunities through entrepreneurship, self-discovery, and harnessing technology. During onboarding, Magamba Michael (from Uganda) joined the board as Co-Founder. Mulungi Raniah and Nelson Kasaranga Fidel (a refugee born in Dr-Congo and who was rejected by his parents due to his albinism). Refugees in Uganda are 35% points less likely than Ugandan nationals to be employed. This is particularly true among women and men (age 16-30 years), where 50 percent of refugee males and 41 percent of females are unemployed, compared to 14 percent of Ugandan males and 16 percent of females. Following self-funding, informal, and formal funding sources, have successfully led YINNOH’s construction of its first Innovation Hub to serve as a free, safe physical, and self-organized learning space for enabling self-organized entrepreneurial learning, fostering cultural exchange, technology, and job creation for refugees. The challenges that Yinnoh is currently addressing include the accomplishment of the Hub that help refugees to attain peer-support for wellbeing. There are challenges in sustaining the operational cost of program delivery and providing basic needs provision to scholars such as meals, soaps, and sanitary pads, particularly to impoverished refugees unable to afford these basic needs during attendance for half-day YINNOH training. Contact yinnoh at: info.youthinnovationhub@gmail.com For immediate or emergency reach out at: benjaminabunuasi@gmail.com

Annual Operating Budget: 20,000 USD

Annual Beneficiary Reach: 90

Our Partnerships

Our Current Funding Partners

Techfugees, Bright smiles, BuffaloGrid , Social entrepreneurship incubation program-SEIP, and BøthOfUs Sweden.

Previous Funding Partners

Bright smiles, Social innovation academy-SINA, Techfugees and privite donors

Our Network Affiliations

Yinnoh is open to humaniterian, activists and private and civil society organizations seeking to develop and strengthen entrepreneurship, digital and life building skills for in-settlement refugees/ displaced persons to discover their untapped talent to build community resilience and accelerate change agents, particularly amongst women and disenfranchised youths.

Optional Support Partner

Support Partners can play an optional role bridging various gaps between RLOs and their supporters around the world.

Additional Information

Our Community and beneficiaries

Although the financial instability, Yinnoh has successfully empowered a good number of youths, over 120, in groups have come up with social enterprises that are aiming to solve social problems in the refugee and their host community. Example of Yinnoh startups; Smart than corona hackathon; www.facebook.com, Sun Out; provides organic, and affordable sunscreen for persons with albinism; www.facebook.com, AVDA secures long-term food supply through the development of local community agriculture to improve food security in the camp; www.facebook.com, NutFood a team of ladies and 2boys, provides organic and nutritious cereals, made foods addressing malnutrition amongst children and the expecting mothers. 7 new startups in incubation;https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PtWoMexyjCMxZOaK7umxTaiT8kUSHNH4w2nkZu3DLD8/edit?usp=sharing. 15 jobs created, 22 youths are on the journey of developing their own social enterprises, 4 social enterprises are under development, 3 social enterprises implementing and operating, and 31 youths are being empowered to be prepared for the entrepreneurial journey in the Yinnoh“green hut stage” for 3months period. Yinnoh March 2022 cohort: Entrepreneurship Program: Personal- and professional development program for aspiring social entrepreneurs. The program is ongoing, and Yinnoh endeavors to raise capital to incubate the Business development ideas of the aspiring social entrepreneurs participating in the program. and provide seed capital to scholars to help them implement (at least 15 refugee-led social enterprises), by 2023.

Other Operating Locations

Rwamwanja_Refugee_Settlement Base camp1

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