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The 2021 campaign of 100 “young leaders” initiated by the Franco-African Foundation was unveiled on June 30 in Paris. The winners come from different sectors: banking, new technologies applied to medicine, media, development-oriented civil society or the productive sector.
Like their predecessors, the 100 young leaders in the 2021 class symbolize the future of French-African ambitions. First with Lancine Koulibaly. He created “Umojà” 3 years ago, a brand of completely plant-based shoes, whose goal is to promote West Africa’s traditional textile knowledge.
“After three years, we have managed to offer a shoe that is 100% plant-based, so that it does not contain any plastic, chemical or synthetic material at all. This means that the shoe, at the end of its life, can decompose quite easily in nature. ”
A shoe made in France with raw materials from West Africa. Umojà works with a women’s cooperative in Burkina Faso. “The purpose of the cooperative is to promote the professional integration of women who have experienced difficult situations: abused women, widows who do not find their place in society. So through crafts, weaving, dyeing, they succeed in being self-sufficient and establishing themselves in society. ”
An opportunity for visibility
For Diane Audrey Ngako, the founder of the cultural company Omenkart, it could not be better to be on the list of 100 young leaders in 2021. “This announcement is timely, as it fell when I opened my company in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. And it is also at the entrepreneurial level a network, the fact of being able to meet people, to also be able to grow human and I say to myself that for Omenkart it is above all the opportunity to be visible to 100 people living in France and living on the continent [africain]. So it’s a great opportunity to develop business, but also fraternal relationships. ”
The list of 2021 class young leaders for the Franco-African Foundation includes Catherine Dubreuil, Development Manager for SOS Sahel. She explains why this NGO is necessary, for example for a destabilized country like Mali.
“SOS Sahel is one of the few non-governmental organizations that has remained in complicated areas despite the instability. And what we bring is all the experience in the field, the local network that we have had in place for 45 years, which makes it possible for us to carry out projects in different territories in the Sahel. And for a project to work and be sustainable, it is necessary to intervene in various aspects. So both in terms of the pedagogical aspect, about water and sanitation, about agricultural methods and to ensure that our farmers become autonomous and generate real sectors. It is all this support that we provide with more and more private partners. ”
SOS Sahel’s support has yielded some concrete results on the ground: an acacia sector in Chad, the development of a phonio sector in Senegal, but much remains to be done.
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