Five teams came up with solutions to problems they care about:

• Eureka Youth Center, an activity center to promote extracurriculars (non-existent in Ethiopia) for ages 15-25

• Bridge, a 2-sided market for graduating university students and employers (Ethiopian universities don’t have career centers)

• Ethio-Face Broadcast, a social media platform to help ease ethnic tensions (more than 80 different Ethiopian cultures)

• Phoenix Girls Center, a set of services for girls empowerment

• HI! School software management to accept payments and track student attendance, grades and other info (non-existent locally)

Ethiopian-born Bethel Endawoke, an intern at NIMBLE, Middlebury College student, and creator of the Fura Innovations project, and NIMBLE founder and CEO Mariette Wharton, developed and led a leadership, design thinking and entrepreneurship workshop for Ethiopian females ages 17-22. Ninety-four ambitious and driven students from 26 universities and high schools applied to the program.

In the words of the first female Ethiopian President Sahle-Work Zewde: "I see a bright future for Ethiopia, whenever I see young girls like you.”

This was an incredible experience leading an empowerment and entrepreneurship program in Bahir Dar with motivated engineering/design university students and college-bound high school students, some in a STEM Incubation center, where a few of these young women learned about TED talks. Since English is their language of instruction, Bethel and Mariette conducted 95% of the program in English, 5% in Amharic (Bethel in Amharic...). The twenty-four students in the Fura-NIMBLE program went through a week-long self-awareness, design thinking, innovation and business planning process, concluding with a Python and Scratch coding class offered by the US Embassy staff.

From zero to one, these young women are empowered and are starting these initiatives with the bootstrapped approach they learned. Job opportunities are crushingly limited, so entrepreneurial ventures are a way to create their own income, but it is evident from their innovative business plans that these young women want to help others foremost.

On August 25, Bethel and Mariette led a Youth Entrepreneurship Summit that also provided networking opportunities for 60-70 for college-bound high school and university young women and men at Unison Hotel in Bahir Dar, Ethiopia.