BA: Please tell us a little bit about yourselves. Who are Dionne Wilson and Andrea Hayford?
DW: I’m a Ghanaian, twenty years old. I’m a studio art major at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. I went to SOS Hermann Gmeiner International College and Christ the King School before that. I grew up in Accra passionate about design and technology. Before that I was actually a computer geek (laughs). I started out with a computer science major in college but I realised that computer programming wasn’t for me and before that I wanted to be a mechanical engineer. I have always had the desire to invent and make things.
I guess that was what my interests translated into - business and social entrepreneurship because entrepreneurship involves coming up with things. I’m mostly into design.
AH: Right now I am an Art and Psychology major at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. I went to SOS Hermann Gmeiner International College with Dionne. Ever since high school, I have been thinking about coming back to Africa and finding ways to solve some of our continent's problems.
BA: What does MindMill actually do?
DW: MindMilll is actually an idea that has been on my mind for two years now. I actually drew inspiration from this design consultancy that’s really big in the U.S.A - IDEO. They basically design things ranging from graphics design to instruments for hospitals. I think what is really unique about them is the approach that they use which is human centred design. It also involves a lot of Psychology and coming up with
solutions to problems, based on researching and drawing from other disciplines and coming up with the most effective solution. I think that’s exactly what I thought Africa needed at this point. I did a summer project with a friend of mine last year and we went to this place in Manya Krobo....it was a library project. During the needs assessment, we realised that the problem wasn’t just the lack of infrastructure at the school, it was about the parents’ mentality about education and how important they thought it was.
What we realized was that mothers wouldn’t invest their money in school fees but they would rather spend a whole lot of money buying beads for their local festival. So...I realized that these problems were really multi-faceted -you can’t just enter a community, and say: "let’s build a borehole here because they don’t have water". Most of the time, a lot of organizations and NGOs are trying to find solutions to the symptoms rather than solving the actual problems. I think that’s what MindMill is really about- trying to pool resources and knowledge from different disciplines, whether it is Art or whether it is Engineering, to solve some
of the community’s really pressing problems.
That’s the vision we have for MindMill. Eventually, we want it to grow into a full profit organization. I think that before we come to that point, i.e. doing space designing for offices, we want to start where we think our expertise or services will be most needed. For now we are a social enterprise which is MindMill Africa but hopefully we will grow into the design firm that will be doing more than just social entrepreneurship. We are already big on social impact though.
BA: This is really fascinating and it is something which we got from looking at your website. We recently posted on a fantastic and very inspiring TED talks programme which said: “if you want to help someone, shut up and listen. ” Research certainly suggests that many NGOs do look at the symptoms and not the actual origin of those symptoms. How can you change that mentality?
MINDS BEHIND MINDMILL
Read about MindMill Africa's refreshingly original approach in contributing to Africa's growth and development.
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