Berry College alum Brin Enterkin, founder of The African SOUP, has been named one of 2018’s “Forbes 30-Under-30 Social Entrepreneurs.”
Forbes describes the 30 social entrepreneurs under the age of 30 as “leveraging business smarts to save the world.”
Enterkin, a 2012 graduate of Berry, is transforming the education system in Uganda through the Active Learning Project, an approach to education created through local input and partnership with the government. This method of teaching is helping shift from rote memorization to an interactive approach that increases critical and creative thinking.
Enterkin was thrilled to make the list.
“Thank you to the entire The African SOUP team, especially my co-founder and friend Michael Kaidhiwa, for providing extraordinary leadership in Uganda to more people than I can possibly count,” Enterkin wrote on her Facebook page.
“As I sit in the African SOUP office on this hot, beautiful day, I am reminded of how thankful I am for God's goodness and of the extraordinary support and love given to me from my closest friends and family.”
While still in high school, Enterkin raised $17,000 from over 500 donors (and obtained matching funds from the Bank of Japan) to build an elementary school in Cambodia. At Berry, Enterkin went to Uganda in the summer of 2009 and worked with micro-financing. While there she met Kaidhiwa, now Country Director of The African SOUP, and they decided to work to together to lift communities out of poverty. She came back to Berry and built a team of student volunteers to help create the structures of change. The result is the African SOUP – a non-profit aimed at using education to break the cycle of poverty.
Through fund-raising and grants, the SOUP’s impact is undeniable, with an exemplary primary school, nutrition outreach programs, sustainability projects, and the creation of a national project developed to engage learners and educators through active learning methodology.
The organization employs 33 staff members and currently works in 40 government schools and three Teach Training Colleges to help shift the method of teaching nationwide from rote memorization (the way it has been passed down from British influence) to active learning. The SOUP believes in partnership with both government structures and NGO’s to bring this method to every classroom in Uganda. For more information go to www.theafricansoup.org.
Berry Management Professor Paula Englis nominated Enterkin.
“Brin is an outstanding young alum. At Berry she took advantage of many curricula opportunities with a double major. But the amount of things she has accomplished is amazing. She has a long history of exemplary service and the ability to make things happen to facilitate substantive change,” Englis said.
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Written by Public Relations
