Date & Timestamp : MAY 17

By Brittany Hoffman, 25 May 2012

I started a new project yesterday. I am trying to interview and photograph all of our graduates from the Business Development Center, at least the ones who have started businesses (which are a lot of them!). My first meeting was yesterday and it was wonderful.

Meet Patrice HABINSHUTI. He’s the one on the right. Patrice participated in the BDC during his third year of university. Two winning competitions and two graduations later, he has a flourishing business – Eden Flowers and Business Support.

His biggest initiative is the Africa Innovation Prize – High School Initiative. Basically, he is starting entrepreneurship clubs in high schools all over Rwanda. Right now he has Memorandums of Understanding with 12 schools.

Ready for the crazy part?

In those 12 schools, there are 4,000 student members!

Just one of those students owns a brickmaking business and employs more than 100 people every day.

By the end of the year, Patrice is planning on being in 50 high schools and expanding his programs to offer a lecture series, relax time, and a chance for the student entrepreneurs to share about their own businesses.

I was so inspired by Patrice and his initiative. He told me that when he was in the BDC, Dr. Mulford called him the “man with unlimited ideas.” He described himself as being “too entrepreneurial” at times.

I think I related.

edited by Kaitlyn Hiltz, 22 December 2015

Fast forward to today, and Patrice has expanded his Africa Innovation Prize – High School Initiative idea, which is now known as the School Entrepeneurs Network, or SEN. SEN is a wholly Rwandan youth-led and youth focused nonprofit organization working to encourage and support entrepreneurship and innovations of high school youth in Rwanda through creating and sustaining entrepreneurship clubs in the Rwandan secondary education system. We are so encouraged by how Patrice continues to grow himself and his community through business and his relationship with God.