#DOTYouth Driving Social Innovation from Grassroots to Global

In 2010, Sipho Mwanza was at home in the Zambian city of Choma when he saw an advertisement for a job collecting data for the census. He had just finished high school, and he was saving up money to attend university. The job seemed perfect, so he applied, and soon found himself bicycling through rural villages asking questions like: For how many years did you attend school? Do you have running water at home? Do you have access to electricity? At night, he and the rest of his team of enumerators slept on the weathered concrete floors of local schools, gazing up at their broken windows and cracked blackboards. “I saw what the situation is in my country – how hard it is for many people – and from this I became glued to the idea of doing community development work,” he remembers.

For Olivier Nkunzurwanda, the journey to becoming a changemaker began with a computer – and a question. It was 2014, and he was living in Rwamwanja Refugee Settlement in Uganda after fleeing conflict in his home country, the Democratic Republic of Congo. He quickly realized that of the camp’s 75,000 residents, he was the only one with a laptop. Instead of keeping it to himself, he thought, What if I bring five guys to sit behind me and whatever I am doing, I also let them try? And thus, the Refugee Innovation Centre was born. Soon, Olivier and other young people in the settlement were offering training in digital skills and entrepreneurship to their fellow refugees. “We do these activities because we understand the community,” he explains. “We are telling what we see, what we know, what we are surviving.” 

What Sipho and Olivier have in common – beyond their passion for driving change in their communities – is that they are both proud alumni of Digital Opportunity Trust (DOT). Olivier attended a DOT digital skills and entrepreneurship training in 2014, and the organization later provided support for the Refugee Innovation Centre. Later, both Olivier and Sipho were members of DOT’s Street Team, a global network of young people taking action to protect their communities from COVID19. Sipho has continued his work with DOT by advising the organization on its latest initiative, Going Beyond, in Zambia. 

What’s more, Sipho and Olivier have both continued their connection to DOT by taking on important leadership roles in CatalystNow, a global movement of social innovators leading grassroots efforts, shaping policy, and sparking change in communities worldwide. The movement, which was co-founded by DOT CEO Janet Longmore, is committed to helping the world achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. Today, it includes some 5,500 social innovators and organizations, and has a presence in 197 countries around the world. 

Like in all aspects of its work, DOT’s participation in CatalystNow is grounded in the belief that young people are not tomorrow’s leaders – they are today’s. Sipho and Olivier embody that. “We bring our youthful perspective to the movement, to help speak to the aspirations of the many youth that Catalyst is trying to reach globally,” Sipho explains. He is the co-chair of CatalystNow’s Zambia chapter, where he leads the strategic direction of the local movement, and both he and Olivier sit on the movement’s governing council, which oversees its work around the globe. Sipho says that he has been inspired by the “tenacity and resilience” of CatalystNow’s members as they fight for a lofty goal, the achievement of every SDG, in every country in the world. “There is this daring spirit within the movement that nothing is impossible,” he explains.