Innovation Hero - Malin Cronqvist

For International Women's Day 2021 I am writing about one female innovation hero per day for the week of 8th to 12th of March. Some of them you might have heard of, some of them not but they are all super inspiring in their own way and in their own domain. 

Day 2: Malin Cronqvist (LinkedIn Profile)

My second awesome innovator is a KTH Innovation alumni and a good friend, and she proves the point that successful innovation doesn't always have to be tech driven.

Malin is the founder and CEO of www.helptohelp.se that started out as a crowdfunding platform for helping ambitious academics in developing countries pay for their tuition.

The idea being to help the countries develop their own academics; doctors, nurses, lawyers, engineers etc. According to Help to Help the enrollment in higher education is still very low. In Tanzania, for instance, more than 81 % of children enroll in primary school yet less than 4 percent proceed to higher education and 50 % of all employers in Tanzani

Today, 10 years after founding Help to Help, they have helped put almost 400 academics through higher education, and the results are stunning:

The reason I have put Malin on my list is because she has has shown again and again that to succeed you not only have to have a good idea, you need grit and perseverance to get the ideas done as well.

The amazing story of how it all started goes something like this:

Some 10 years ago, Malin was reading an article about one of the large charities and something about top management embezzling money. She had previously been frustrated over that it was hard to know where your money went when donating to the traditional charities, and that they weren't all that transparent.

She then and there decided to so something about it, so she told her father she was going to Africa to have a look for herself. Being Malin's father, he knew that when Malin decides to do something, it gets done. So it was more a matter of finding where to go, rather than trying to decide on going or not. They agreed on Tanzania and off she went.

Before the trip she had also crowdfunded some money from friends and family to be able to act on whatever might come up once she got there. After spending some time in Tanzania doing volunteer work, she quickly made friends and one day she met one of them and asked him how he was, and he answered "It's the happiest day of my life and the saddest day of my life. It's the happiest day because I just heard I was accepted into university, I am the first person in my family, from my village even, to ever be able to attend university. However, it's the saddest day of my life since I can't afford to accept, I need all the money I make to help support my family."

As it happened, the money Malin had crowdfunded was the equivalent of what was needed to put her friend through school, so she decided it was a worthy cause to use the money for.

And that was the birth of the idea. Malin realized that by helping pay for university education, countries could cultivate their own higher educated workforce. She often takes the example with a doctor: One doctor that travels to Africa and spends 6 months there can only treat so many patients, but one local doctor that spends her or his life treating patients, can treat thousands of patients over a life time of work.

After coming home to Sweden, she took up studies at KTH Royal Institute of Technology where she saw there was an innovation support unit, KTH Innovation. She contacted us and told us about her idea, and even though we initially might have been reluctant since it didn't sound like deep tech, we were attracted by the possibilities of creating positive impact in the world.

10 years later and it is a success all around. Malin has been awarded multiple times for her leadership, her drive and her passion. She has climbed Kilimanjaro with well-known Swedish adventurer Ola Skinnarmo (well, due to covid they couldn't travel to Africa but they climbed a hill outside of Stockholm 64 times to reach the same height), arranged big IT boot camps for African women and a lot more.

Help to Help have recently secured funding from a team of philanthropists (Four Founders) that have committed one million dollars over six years to create "the world's most efficient educational program for young people in Africa" and and if anyone can do it, it's Malin Cronqvist and Help to Help.

But I think the best way to describe the success of Help to Help is to listen to the stories of the people that have been helped by the program. The ambition and drive of these young changemakers is going to change Tanzania and the world for the better, I can promise you that.

Please take some time to visit Help to Helps website and take a look for yourself, and why not make a donation? the world will thank you!

Help to Help | Updates from us and our students

Malin Cronqvist - Totally worthy of a place on my list of awesome female innovators!

Make sure to check tomorrow again for number three!