Blaze be your own boss resumes as Kakamega hosts first summit

More than 3500 youth in Kakamega County got a chance to engage and learn from BLAZE partners and mentors on entrepreneurship during BLAZE Be Your Own Boss Kakamega summit held at the Sigalagala National Polytechnic.

The summit comes barely a week after the launch of the fourth edition of BYOB.

Be Your Own Boss (BYOB) features youth mentorship summits and creation camps all focused on empowering Kenyan youth to achieve success by providing valuable information, skills and networking opportunities in a variety of fields including: creative arts, fashion, film and photography, music, agriculture, sales and production and sports.

This year, BYOB has expanded its youth engagement programme to 18 summits, compared to last year’s three, which engaged more than 26,000 youth.

“The fourth edition of BYOB aims to empower 1.3 million youth by providing access to a platform that allows them to connect, learn and showcase their talent. We decided to change the approach and increase the number of summits in a region in order to reach more young Kenyans,” said Sylvia Mulinge, Chief Customer Officer – Safaricom.

The second BYOB summit will be held on Friday 5th July in Kisii before proceeding to Siaya and Kisumu. Like in the previous editions, attendees will interact with local mentors who are industry experts through interest-specific pods where they will go through workshops and learn from the mentor’s experience.

The summits will feature mentors such as Fundi Frank (fashion designer), Brian Diang’a (Professional Gamer), Nancie Mwai (fashion vlogger and retailer), Joanna Kinuthia (beauty content creator), Caleb Karuga (farmer and agribusiness consultant), among others.

In addition to the mentors, BLAZE has partnered with Huawei, Google, IBM, USAID-K-YES, Wezesha, and other partners, to provide a mix of content, training and employment opportunities to BLAZE subscribers who attend the summits.