JA Ghana COY Online Competition 2020

August 2020 Ghana

The flagship JA Company Program supported by Tomorrow Foundation through the Futurepreneurship Program is an experiential program that teaches high school students how to start and run a business within the context of a school. Students run business enterprises under the guidance of a teacher, with support from volunteers from the business community who act as coaches and mentors. Prior to the closure of schools due to Covid-19, 13 high schools in Accra, Kumasi and Tamale had been selected to participate in the 2020 cycle of the program. Teachers and volunteers had also been trained to commence enrolment of students.

With the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and the eventual closure of schools, JA Ghana decided to digitize the Company Program for the first time and redefine the 13-week Company Program curriculum into a 4-week crash online course in Google Classroom that was accessible to every senior high school student. It allowed reaching a much higher number of students. Thus totally over 400 students from 30+ schools across 7 regions in Ghana signed up to be part of the entrepreneurship course.

The Company of the Year (COY) Competition was also remodeled into a business idea competition instead of previous year’s editions where students were required to operate their businesses.

After 4 challenging weeks of learning how to start a business, acquiring new skills and content delivery, there were 4 weeks of pitching and online voting. Following these 8 weeks, 6 teams from 6 high schools competed in the grand Finale on August 18^th in JA Ghana's first ever Company of the Year (COY) Online Competition.

 

Our founder Mrs Gu was part of the jury during the online competition, challenging with the other judges all the teams on their business model, product and projected financials. Following the final exchanges, the winners of the first prize of 1000$ were Self-Made from Tema International School who planned to develop a fitness application to help people having healthier activities and food. They will also represent Ghana at the JA Africa Regional COY Competition at the end of the year.  

Regarding the Tomorrow Foundation Future Tech/ Innovation Award which is given to the company that best illustrates new, original, or groundbreaking ideas, it was granted to the team ElitAmigos from Ghana Senior High School for their bio degradable food packages.    

Many thanks to JA Ghana team for the success of this first online competition of their history!