Unilever Launches 6th Edition Of Africa IdeaTrophy

Unilever Ghana with the sole aim at improving youth employability through practical experiences from the corporate world has launched the 6th edition of Unilever Africa IdeaTrophy at Golden Tulip.

Unilever IdeaTrophy business challenge was created by Unilever Turkey in 2001 to create a challenging and creative experience for university students as well as introduce young people to the realities of the business world.

Speaking at the media launch of the 6th edition of Unilever Africa IdeaTrophy, the Managing Director of Unilever Ghana, Ziobeieton Yeo revealed that the competition in Ghana kicked off in 2012 and it has been running year-on-year since its inception with an average yearly participation of over thousand students across universities in Ghana.

“It is our way of contributing to improve employability of young people and in doing so, we just play our role in line with universal living plan...I will personally want to encourage the youngsters that if you have an ambition of contributing to your country and if you think you can make a difference, here is the starting point; partner with us to help you bring out the best in you”, Mr. Yeo told Peacefmonline.com.

Every year, a leading Unilever brand is selected as the sole focus of IdeaTrophy; giving University students the opportunity to design a business strategy for the brand in focus, work as a team, brainstorm, think out of the box as well as learn new skills and mentorship from Unilever Managers.

The Managing Director, Unilever Ghana again said that students have had the opportunity to work on great brands on this competition including: Lifebuoy, Rexona, CloseUp and Lipton and OMO.

“This year’s edition is bigger, better and very challenging. Students will get the opportunity to work with a Unilever premium brand: OMO with the tagline, ‘Dirty is Good (DiG)”.

Winners of IdeaTrophy in the first edition were from Ashesi University College (Portia, Precious and Richard); they each got iPads, internship at Unilever Ghana and represented Unilever Ghana at Future Leaders League in Singapore.

The second edition saw winners from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (Vanessa, Yaw and Eva); they also got iPads, 3 months’ internship at Unilever, continued their tenure as National Service Personnel and are currently engaged as Brand Managers of Unilever as part of their marketing team. Yaw, on the other hand is also enrolled as a management trainee in Unilever and is currently on an international assignment.

The fifth edition was however a historic one as for the first time in the history of the competition, it was open to only Unilever Brand Ambassadors and interns; thus, for the first time, Ghana emerged the ultimate Africa Champions (the very first Ghanaian group to win this contest since its inception in 2012) with their counterparts from Nigeria coming second place. As winners of the Africa rounds, they further represented Africa at the Global Future Leaders League in London in April this year.