Petroleum engineer and social entrepeneur, Dennis Kofi Borti, has been named among the Queen’s Young Leaders highly commended runners up for 2016. The Queen’s Young Leaders Award recognises and celebrates exceptional people aged 18-29 from across the Commonwealth, who are taking the lead in their communities and using their skills to transform lives. The Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Trust, in partnership with Comic Relief and The Royal Commonwealth Society, launched The Queen’s Young Leaders Programme on 9 July 2015 at Buckingham Palace. It was established in honour of Her Majesty The Queen’s 60 years of service to the Commonwealth.

Prior to being named for this, Dennis was also nominated with two other candidates from Africa for the 2015 Corporate Leadership Award Category of the African Youth Foundation (AYF) ADLER Awards held in Frankfurt, Germany on December 5. As an engineer, social entrepreneur and goal driven professional, he brings his experience in engineering operations and project engineering to the team guiding the group to achieve the group’s core values of operational and project excellence. His role is to provide technical marketing support, identify technical solutions to enhance competitiveness and facilitate concept development and deployment. Dennis has shown excellence and immense leadership potential from a very young age. He has a BSc. Petroleum Engineering degree from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science & Technology – Ghana where he was a recipient of the Tenaris Roberto Rocca Scholarship Award for talented engineering students 2012 and was also named among 100 of the best final year students worldwide studying oil and gas related courses by the Society of Petroleum Engineer’s (SPE) International Petroleum Technology Conference (IPTC) in 2011. He has since worked on drilling, completions and production projects both onshore and offshore in the oil and gas industry and currently focusing his experience, talents and energy into social entrepreneurship for change and empowerment in rural African communities. Dennis Kofi Borti, is the co-founder and Director of Technical & Operations of ThinkAfrik.

ThinkAfrik is a fully owned Ghanaian company which was first established as an idea to provide an innovative alternative of facing poverty and underdevelopment in Africa, that is about empowerment, not dependence, and investments, not charity. ”We are not only finding immediate short term solutions, but we are investing in long-term wealth creation and sustainable uplifting solutions as well. This is what we believe real empowerment should be. We are collaborating on the field to finding solutions to very specific local problems”, according to Dennis Kofi Borti.

Mission
Its mission is to provide sustainable solutions to Africa’s developmental challenges using innovative strategies and methods thriving from the use of the group’s technical expertise.

The functional story of ThinkAfrik is an indigenous African firm that seeks to provide services and solutions to enhance African lives and businesses.

ThinkAfrik’s staff has a passion for challenge, continuous improvement and delivering innovative solutions that meets the socio-economic development needs of Africa.

Vision
ThinkAfrik aims to become a leading African group providing services streamlined towards empowering African lives and finding alternate, sustainable and innovative solutions to Africa’s most challenging problems.

Hub Structure
ThinkAfrik operates as more than just a social enterprise, it is a movement! A movement seeking to awaken innovation and change in Africa. A movement seeking to raise a new breed of innovative technical leaders and social entrepreneurs who seek growth and more than just self. It currently runs three active hubs in Ghana (Accra, Kumasi and Tamale) and looking to expand even into neighboring countries Togo and Cote d’Ivoire.

Current Projects & Activities
Communal Projects
Several communal outreach programs have been undertaken including Water Sanitation Awareness and Post-Harvest Crop Processing Awareness programs in rural communities in northern Ghana. These two projects he iterated were chosen because of the unavailability of potable drinking water and the prevalence of waterborne diseases especially among children in northern Ghana. The main economic input in these communities being agriculture – subsistence farming, Shea Butter production, etc. The programs are therefore helping to optimize the benefits from agriculture and also help curb the water sanitation crisis. A pilot project has started in Kpene in the Tamale district of Northern Ghana, creating awareness and teaching families simple techniques to purify drinking water. Inhabitants are taught safe water handling and purification techniques and good crop-processing practices. 30 storage gallons where donated during this outreach to help the inhabitants store their potable water in. Engineering designs are underway to construct a larger scale water treatment that will be used and managed commercially for the people of Kpene and its environs. The mid-term objective of the group is to establish a fund which seeks to construct water treatment plants and crop storage silos in these communities.

Education and Student Outreach
The entire ThinkAfrik team realizes that the future depends on a new breed of leaders, ready to solve Africa’s most challenging problems. To achieve the sustainability of their dream as an organization, they see the need to inspire, create and support young shapers to be well suited and prepared to take challenging technical roles in Africa’s industrial, manufacturing, engineering and commercial industries. Hence, ThinkAfrik has initiated education outreach programs aimed at igniting the passion for social entrepreneurship and technological innovation among young students.

Since its inception in June 2015, a total of 1,624 students from four different schools in Ghana have been impacted directly through the Education Outreach programs nationwide with 22 brilliant and talented but needy pupils benefiting from scholarship packages. The schools visited so far are:

• Nasru Deen JHS A – Asokore Municipality, Kumasi, Ghana
• Kanvilli Presby Experimental JHS – Tamale, Ghana
• Bagabaga Demonstration Primary School – Sanerigu District, Tamale
• Kpene Community School – Tamale

They are looking to expand the numbers and grow further to impact lives even beyond the shores.

According to Dennis Kofi Borti, there are more than five planned events through the year ranging from Education outreach, “Passions to Profit” program, Ekua Pa project and mentoring/networking seminars.

Below are some of the projects in details:

Passions to Profit
The project aims to provide interventions to support and partner young people with brilliant ideas for social enterprises through the formation of productive and sustained networks. He believes that it will greatly contribute to the development of the capacities of the youth, reduce unemployment, create wealth, increase entrepreneurial activity in Ghana and promote social entrepreneurship as a viable career option.

Ekua Pa
The Ekua Pa project is an agricultural project meant to provide technical and logistics support to rural farmers.

For inquiries and/or partnerships, send an e-mail to the ThinkAfrik team: info@thinkafrik.com

Website: http://www.thinkafrik.com/

You can follow ThinkAfrik on Facebook, Twitter and on Youtube @ThinkAfrik.

LinkedIn: Think Afrik

Source: pniridescent.com