Mandela Washington Fellowship fosters cross-cultural connections at Notre Dame
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The Pulte Institute for Global Development at the University of Notre Dame hosted its 10th cohort of Mandela Washington Fellows over the last six weeks.
A flagship program of the U.S. Department of State’s Young African Leaders Initiative, this year’s iteration of the Mandela Washington Fellowship at Notre Dame included 13 women and 11 men from 21 African countries spanning Angola to Zimbabwe. Altogether, 700 fellows took part in the program across 28 schools in the country.
Fellows underwent a Leadership in Business Institute program that included academic coursework, community service, cultural exchange and networking opportunities with industry and community leaders across Indiana, Illinois and Michigan.
“While they’re here at Notre Dame, we provide them with skills building, an academic coursework focused on practical application of entrepreneurial skills,” Pulte Institute Academic Director Edward Jurkovic said. “How they can best and most effectively implement business models, prototype new ideas and come up with solutions for existing problems. How they can utilize business skills like unit economics, marketing, to augment and better the businesses that they’re already running back home.”
In the last two years, the institute has taken the community engagement aspect further, partnering with the South Bend Entrepreneurship and Adversity Program (SBEAP), enabling the young African leaders to brainstorm over some of the local entrepreneurs biggest challenges.
“We were thinking about a really interesting way to do community service and partnerships in a way that’s actually going to match up with the skills and the interests they have,” Jurkovic added. “It’s become not only an opportunity for partnership but also for mutual problem solving. We realized that these are two groups of people who are passionate about the same things and if we just bring them together, really cool things will probably happen.”
With both the Pulte Institute and the McKenna Center for Human Development and Global Business under the Keough School of Global Affairs at Notre Dame, facilitating the experience proved seamless. The eight SBEAP grads worked with a team of fellows over the two-week period.
“We targeted entrepreneurs that had a mature enough business and also had a discrete problem that the African entrepreneurs could effectively address in two weeks of meeting,” McKenna Center Program Manager Sue McDonald said. “Of course, all entrepreneurs need some kind of help in some kind of way but some of the problems are more extensive, or require more local knowledge. Some entrepreneurs haven’t really even begun their marketing, and they wanted help with marketing.”
Tierra Easton, a South Bend native and owner of TTT Creations, a custom gift shop, was paired with a team of three fellows, including Cheikh Abdallahi from Nouakchott, Mauritania. Easton said she appreciated the out-of-the-box ideas and constructive criticism she received from the fellows, which helped her refine her business strategies.
“We spoke about some of the rough edges with starting a business, the journey of where you are and where you might want to go,” Easton said. “The biggest lesson has been consistency and the importance of knowing your audience and your numbers.”
Named for herself, her daughter, Tierranee, and her son, Taurean, Easton, who also works in health care, sees TTT Creations as a vehicle to lift her family into generational wealth.
“I started from the ground up, officially, in 2021, mid-pandemic,” she said. “Things were very iffy during the pandemic, and I just wanted that financial security for my family. I don’t come from money and I want to create that wealth for my community as well as my household.”
As a member of the fellow team working with Easton, Abdallahi, who currently works as a financial planner and analyst with Kinross Gold Corp., shared the analysis the team performed on Easton’s business.
“Her brand story is a huge strength, but she has several weaknesses she needs to address, including refining her branding and marketing strategy, operational efficiency and photography,” Abdallahi noted. “The opportunities are huge if she can get more bulk order customers like universities or companies. Threats include market competition, scalability issues, risk of burnout and inefficiency when handling everything alone.”
Abdallahi has Master’s degrees in energy economics and management as well as strategic management and finance from French schools. He has founded two charities so far and plans to launch a training center to educate young Mauritanians on the dangers of illegal migration and provide them with alternatives to succeed at home.
“Besides my professional side, I have a huge interest in the community side, I am passionate about humanity,” Abdallahi said. “We have been witnessing a huge wave of illegal migration through Nicaragua, with this we want to prevent young Mauritanians from climbing the wall of Mexico.”
This cross-cultural interaction provided both groups with fresh perspectives and new strategies to tackle their respective challenges.
“The skills that the African entrepreneurs bring are actually very robust. They give the entrepreneurs very different ways to approach their problems or different angles to think about how to strategize and prioritize the building of their businesses,” McDonald said. “For the African entrepreneurs, my impression is that it was good for them to interact with Americans that they wouldn’t necessarily otherwise interact with. This is another dimension of America, which is very real and very important.”
McDonald speaks about the expertise the young African leaders bring as well as the impact the partnership had on both the local entrepreneurs and the Mandela Washington Fellows.
Continued support and continued connections are two of the biggest things Jurkovic and McDonald said had come out of the SBEAP partnership.
“Everyone came out of the meeting so energized, both the African entrepreneurs and the SBEAP entrepreneurs,” McDonald said. “There’s ways to have ongoing collaborations or input or dialogue, or even to expand this kind of interaction. With Zoom everybody can connect.”
LaDawn White, owner of Labor of Love Childcare and Labor of Love Nanny Agency, a spinout from the pandemic, conferred with the fellows about her new venture, Almost Vegan, a plant-based food business that’s set to officially launch next month.
“With Almost Vegan, I really want to build a community of people that are looking for information and resources on healthy eating, healthy lifestyle choices and want to make choices that affect the environment in a positive way.” White said. “I was paired up with three different individuals. One has restaurant and food industry experience and the other two have social media, IT experience. They helped me figure out marketing, brand awareness and operations, which was invaluable.”
While White initially thought the collaboration would be the other way around, she was pleasantly shocked when she discovered that the fellows would instead be providing her with recommendations for her business.
“That perspective shift was great; the whole dynamic was really cool,” White added. “I was able to learn a whole lot about how Instagram is really big in certain areas where they live. Being paired with other people who had either experience in the industry or had experience with some aspect of the business like social media, IT was cool.”
Shakila Mshana, originally from Arusha, Tanzania, was part of the team of fellows assigned to White. Accustomed to working with tech entrepreneurs at StartHub Africa, Mshana said she was excited to work with a business in another industry.
“While we were diagnosing her business, we found out that the name was a bit conflicting. Because if I’m vegan and I hear the word almost vegan, that tells me that that is not fully vegan. So we suggested a name change,” Mshana said. “There was a lot of idea validation and problem solving. This was my first time actually working with a non-tech startup and it was just amazing just even thinking through her production process. It was super cool.”
Along with her two German co-founders, Mshana runs StartHub Africa, an innovation hub supporting early stage startups and working mainly with universities.
“We are trying to create a pipeline where we train and support student innovators and then we take them into another advanced program called Startup Catalyzer for further support from there,” she explained. “The program in Tanzania started last year but we have one amazing startup that is doing really well right now. It’s called Chur Link. They help students graduating from high school make better decisions on what courses they should take at university, etc.”
Through sheer excellence and hard work, Mshana quickly rose through the ranks at a company she joined straight out of college. With her background in computer science, Mshana was looking for more business training when a friend shared the fellowship application link with her.
“As much as I had previous work experience, it was not on the managerial/leadership level. Taking on this role of co-founder and leading an entire organization in a new country, it was not so easy,” Mshana said. “When I saw there was leadership in business, which is exactly the kind of training I was looking for, I decided to apply. I 100% felt I was going to get a lot out of it and so far, it’s beyond what I expected.”
Launched in 2017, Mshana and her co-founders, hope to expand StartHub Africa into Kenya by 2025 and eventually other East African countries.
The fellowship also has a Leadership in Public Management track and a Leadership in Civic Innovation track. Fellows who get put in Notre Dame’s Leadership in Business track have either already started businesses or plan to launch new ventures in their home countries.
“We have a specific focus on entrepreneurship because that’s a specific skill we have in Notre Dame. We connect them with our IDEA Center, which is the commercialization and startup arm of the university,” Jurkovic said. “Our fellows are able to apply to the McCloskey New Venture competition; that’s something that’s typically only open to Notre Dame students and alumni.”
Jurkovic explains why Notre Dame offers the Leadership in Business track.
With a focus on alleviating, impacting and creating pathways out of global poverty, the Pulte Institute sees entrepreneurship as a developmental tool that is core to the success of its mission.
“The fellows are on the frontlines of that work, by creating enterprises, by providing jobs, by strengthening economies and by being good leaders in their own community. They are contributing most directly to those issues in their respective communities,” Jurkovic said. “So for us success looks like these fellows going back to their home countries, using the skills that we’ve provided them with and using the continued partnership that we have with them to strengthen their impact in their communities, countries and continent.”
Nigerian Paul Olubori Kehinde wears many hats in the country’s youth developmental space. His company, a financial literacy and upskilling platform called GoLearn, interacts with students in 45 universities across the country and has trained more than 5,000 young adults in different digital skills including forex trading, affiliate marketing, blockchain, cryptocurrency and real estate investing.
Kehinde, who also co-founded Bricks & Rafters, a real estate company with $3 million in assets under management, applied for the fellowship on the recommendation of an admirer of his work.
“I’ve been able to learn the technology of human capital and some of the things that are making the United States work. I realized that entrepreneurship is at the heart of the U.S.,” Kehinde said. “Even how the government supports young people, encouraging creativity and innovation. I also see this mentality of support for everyone. It’s very encouraging to me. I’m going to take that back home to see how far we can go teaching that to our young Nigerians.”
Fellows were also assigned individual mentors who shared insights and helped them think bigger for the ventures they currently run or plan to run. Kehinde’s coach, Sam Miller, encouraged him to begin thinking about monetizing his products.
“GoLearn has been running for three years now and I’ve personally invested over $100,000. We’ve never received any funding or grants, and so Sam has been helping me come up with a commercialization plan so that we can sustain the enterprise,” Kehinde said. “We already have a program that we are about to monetize and I’m happy about that. It would help us raise funds to sustain the enterprise without me spending personal funds.”
Kehinde reflects on how the program has validated the ideas he has for youth and development in his country, Nigeria.
The connections made during the fellowship make Notre Dame the top choice for fellows who may look to further their education in the future, when previously, South Bend would not have been on their radar.
“Often when people from the African continent come to the US, they’re thinking New York, Chicago, California. But when our fellows come here, they really fall in love with this place and they also recognize the business opportunities that are here,” Jurkovic said. “They want to come back to this state because they have connections here, they have experience here, they know that it’s a good place to learn and to do business.”
Reflecting on his experience traveling to the U.S. for the first time, Kehinde noted that his vision was not only clearer, it had become bigger.
“I’ve had these ideas and coming here just reinforced that they are possible because I’m seeing the end result of the things that I’ve been thinking about,” he said. “It’s possible to have a community full of entrepreneurs, who are bringing innovation, developing new products and injecting money into the economy. I’m more confident about my ideas, that they are actually valid and that with time the people in my country will be able to catch up with them.”