Isaya Yunge is an unshakable
optimist, futurist, and visionary thinker with a rare intellect. With a passion
for entrepreneurship and technology, Isaya is an enthusiast who turns ideas
into reality, and is a tireless advocate for youth involvement in creating
innovative solutions that impact people’s lives.
Isaya is the founder and chief executive of Somaapps Technologies which created
SomaApp, a mobile app which is revolutionising how scholarships are offered in
Africa.
Isaya and his team came up with the idea after seeing how many domestic and
international scholarships go unclaimed each year because young people are
simply unaware of them. Isaya is trained at by the Swedish Institute on
Sustainable Business models and he currently studies Leading Change at
Cambridge university. He uses mobile software to address the needs of African
communities.
Yunge had a difficult childhood. His parents never married so he was born and
raised an outcast. He was raised by his grandmother and spent his childhood
herding goats, cows and chasing birds on rice plantations.
Peaceful as he was, he says he was always rejected, whether by his step-mother
or step-father. It made his upbringing unstable and unpredictable. He had to
live from one foster family to another. He was forced to live by himself from
the second year of secondary school. He worked after school to earn money for
food and rent.
In 2014, he became curious about the tech industry, particularly the app
business.
That year, he attended a talk about the fourth industrial revolution, the
sharing economy and collaborative commons, by Jeremy Rifkin, an American
economist. It was affirmation he would one day solve Africa’s problems through
digital technology.
Today, SomaApps is a scholarship-matching app that lists and matches students
with thousands of domestic and international scholarships. His aim is to
accelerate the advent of mobile software technologies, artificial intelligence
and the Internet of Things in Tanzania. He employs 12 people.
Along his journey, he has collected a number of accolades. In 2006, he was
elected to become the chairperson of the Junior Council of the United Republic
of Tanzania, spoke at the G8 Summit at the age of 17, won the GSMA Mobile Money
Africa Hackathon as best startup in Africa in 2017, won the prestigious Queens
Young Leaders Award and won at the Start-up Turkey Award as one of the top
three startups in the world.
Isaya Yunge was recognized by Forbes Africa 30 Under 30 as a promising
change-maker in the continent and received “The Queens Young Leaders Award
2018” from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, for his work using technology to
impact communities and lives with sustainable solutions.
As an alumni of the Harvard Ministerial Leadership Program, Isaya is passionate
about advocating for a tech startup friendly environment, with the goal of
inspiring innovation and African technological advancement.
He was named amongst the 50 Most Influential Young Tanzania’s in 2019 and he
spoke at the G8 Summit in Berlin Germany at the age of 17, after being selected
as the UNICEF Africa Youth Ambassador at the G8 2007.`
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