Isaac Sesi, a Ghanaian Entrepreneur, Engineer and founder of Sesi Technologies, a Ghanaian company that solves agricultural and food challenges has received the Shuttleworth Foundation Flash Grant as a support to his work.
Shuttleworth Foundation awards a number of small grants, twice a year, to a collection of social change agents, no strings attached, in support of their work. They call these Flash Grants and recipients are selected based on nominations from the foundation’s fellows. Each award is worth $5,000 and you do not have to apply for it.
Isaac Sesi was unexpectedly nominated by Arthur Attwell, a fellow of the foundation for the work he and his company have been doing. In an email, Arthur explained why he nominated Isaac for the award.
“Hi Isaac
It’s a real pleasure to be able to recognise the work you’re doing. In addition to your exciting work with small-scale farmers, I was impressed by and grateful for your openness on your blog. It takes a lot of energy, courage and generosity to share your journey and your thinking, and to do it with such professionalism. Thank you for that.”
In line with the foundation’s core philosophy of openness, the only requirement for the use of the grant is to share with the world how a beneficiary gets to use the money.
In sharing the good news, Isaac indicated his interest in investing the money into projects he is already working on and outlined three of these projects as follows;
Firstly the money will be invested into Sesi Technologies SaveTheGrains Project. SaveTheGrains is a soon-to-be-launched project to mobilize support to help smallholder farmers in Africa fight poverty through post-harvest technologies.
Secondly, to Nsesa Foundation, Isaac’s non-profit that is working to bring basic technology skills at the fingertips of youth in Africa. This project is being done through other projects such as SuaCode and Project iSWEST.
Thirdly, Isaac intends to apply part of the grant towards furthering the philosophy of open knowledge by writing a few e-books.
“Receiving the Shuttleworth Foundation Flash Grant has been a huge validation of the work my teams and I have been doing. To anyone out there doing social good, I say to you: continue in your good work. You don’t know who is watching. ” Isaac concluded.
