Category Wonder Kids

Sometimes, great businesses start from a small idea. And if you keep an eye out, you might just spot the idea, like Akshay Ruparelia, the teenager from Harrow, London, did, Akshay set up an online real-estate business when he was 17, after he realised the hefty sum charged by high-end real estate agents in the U.K. Today, his business is one among the many successful ones in the U.K.

The idea

Akshay is from Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire, England. Living with his parents, both of them hearing impaired, Akshay was shocked to discover the costs.

After finishing his GCSEs (equivalent to Class X) he developed an app called HouseSmart. The app was aimed at connecting property buyers and sellers. However, he scrapped the idea even before launching it.

Then, when he has studying for his A-levels, Akshay came up with the idea of doorsteps.cp.uk, a real estate website that he developed.

Setting up the site

Still a teenager, Akshay needed money to make his dream reality. He turned to his family and relatives for loan and they obliged. Akshay managed to obtain a 7,000-poind loan, a majority of which was provided by his uncle who had started and sold two online businesses of his own.

With the initial amount, Akshay managed to set up a very basic website and have it up-and-running from the bedroom of his house in 2016 when he was just 17.

The first client

Akshay knew that he might not get a client immediately. And he was patient. A few months after starting his website, he got his first customer from East Sussex, England. The customer wished to sell his house and some land, and Akshay decided to pay a visit to the place himself. He had his sisters, friend drive him since he was underage for a driver’s licence.

He met the client and got to work. A few weeks later, he managed to sell the house for a good rate, and Doorsteps received its first five-star review. Akshay, though, could not celebrate his success immediately since he had to study for his A-level examination.

Slowly and steadily, Akshay’s business began to grow. Still in school, he enlisted a call centre to take calls from clients when he was in school. Once home, he would attend to them. As his business began to grow, Akshay employed a network of mothers who show clients houses that are up for sale for a fraction of the cost that other real estate agents charge.

 Akshay’s business became so popular that in just over a year since it was started, it was listed as the 18th biggest estate agency in the U.K. This also made him the country’s youngest millionaire.

Today, Doorsteps continues to sell houses and is among the top companies in the U.K.

What makes him special?

Akshay identified a problem when he was helping his parents move homes and decided to devise a solution to tackle it. He worked hard, balanced education and business and managed to set up a successful business at a young age.

 

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If you were stung by a bee, twice, around the same time, you will probably run away from them the next time you see them. But four-year-old Mikaila from Austin, Texas, the U.S. became fascinated with them and is today selling lemonades and donating proceeds from her sales to organizations fighting for the survival of honeybees. This is her story.

Two stings and a cookbook later

In 2009, when she was just four, Mikaila’s parents, both with business degrees, encouraged her to come up with a product for an upcoming children’s business competition and for Austin Lemonade Day. She put on her thinking cap and was coming up with ideas when two interesting events happened in her life – in a span of two weeks, she was stung by two bees, and her great grandmother who lives in Cameron, South Carolina, sent the family a cookbook of hers from the 1940s.

These two moments were to define the path Mikaila was going to choose.

After she was stung by the bees, her parents encouraged her to read up about them and the things they do for the ecosystem instead of becoming averse to them. When she did her research, she learnt about the importance of honeybees and that their population was declining.

That’s when her great grandmother’s cookbook came in handy. Mikaila decided to use a special recipe of flaxseed lemonade her great granny used to make to start her own lemonade stall and help honeybees by contributing proceeds from her stall for their conservation.

This is how her company Me & the Bees was born.

An entrepreneur and a bee ambassador

Mikaila’s company made and sold flaxseed lemonade sweetened with local honey sourced from local beekeepers.

Year after year she would sell out of her Me & the Bees lemonade stall at youth entrepreneurial events and donate a percentage of the profit towards bee conservation.

As the business kept growing, her parents helped her strike the balance between her business and her school life.

In 2015, Mikaila’s business made a breakthrough when it won a contract to supply lemonade to supermarket chain Whole Foods Market. The same year, Mikaila appeared in the U.S. reality show “Shark tank” where she pitched her product to investors. Making an impact, Mikaila found an investor who invested USD 60,000 in her company.

Two years later, a consortium of current and former American football players invested USD 8,00,000 in Me & the Bees lemonade.

In 2015, Mikaila was also invited to the White House by then U.S. President Barack Obama.

Today, Mikaila has sold over a million bottles of her lemonade in the U.S. and is giving speeches at entrepreneurial conferences and workshops. In 2017, she launched her own non-profit – the Healthy Hive Foundation – to conduct research, education and protection projection for honeybees.

Her company continues to donate 10% of all profits to bee conservation groups.

What makes her special?

Her dedication, presence of mind and thought. Despite being stung by bees, she decided to read up on them and help towards their conservation by coming up with a business based on a recipe her great grandmother had sent her around the same time.

Today, even after being in business for nearly 10 years and selling millions of bottles, she continues to donate towards bee conservation.

 

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Hannah Herbst from Florida, the U.S., is a teen inventor and social innovator. Currently studying Computer Science at Florida Atlantic University, Hannah believes computers provide a great platform to make people’s lives better.

Hannah has been involved in extra-curricular activities since she was very young – she has dabbled in singing and athletics. In her seventh grade, she was introduced to engineering as a platform for problem-solving when she attended a summer engineering camp. She was the only girl at the camp, which involved building robots. She learnt from her peers and online articles about how to program and build robots. Hannah found the camp interesting and started to develop an interest in engineering.

Later the same year, when she received a letter from her pen pal in Ethiopia, she realised how engineering could be used to solve problems such as energy poverty. This led to the birth of what was later called BEACON.

What about the letter inspired her?

When Hannah was in the fourth grade, her teacher introduced her class to a programme called Compassion International, where kids can connect with other kids in the world through a pen pal letter-writing system. During this programme, Hannah befriended Ruth from Ethiopia who was a few years younger than her. Ruth and Hannah would exchange letters every now and then.

Time passed by and when Hannah was in her seventh grade, Ruth wrote to her about the problems she was facing due to energy poverty. These included lack of electricity and access to clean water.

Hannah was moved by the problems faced by Ruth and people living in similar situations, and decided to use her newly found interest in engineering to create a device that would solve Ruth’s problems.

A BEACON of hope

Living in Florida and being surrounded by big bodies of water, Hannah decided to focus on using water her source for power. She started building a device called BEACON (Bringing Electricity Access to Countries through Ocean Energy), which would tap energy from moving water and convert it into usable electricity. This could be used to charge batteries as well as a way to purify water using a process called two-phase microfiltration.

Initially, Hannah built a big, complicated, wave energy-collecting device, but the device would keep breaking. Her Science teacher urged her to take a different path, but she found it difficult to move away from the first prototype she built. She thought it would work.

However, she moved on, and working with her mentor, she finally built the prototype. BEACON fetched her the title of America’s Top Young Scientists in 2015, as she won the Discovery Education and 3M Young Scientist Challenge. BEACON was exhibited at the White House Science Fair, and Hannah has spoken about her invention at the United Nations Science, Technology and Innovation Summit.

She wishes to make BEACON a commercial device soon.

What makes her special?

Hannah empathised with Ruth’s problems and decided to use her interest in engineering to help her. Despite her prototype breaking several times, Hannah never gave up until BEACON became a reality.

 

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Children are considered innocent and playful, obvious of the evil around them. But today, these same innocent children are standing up to speak against the menaces that plague society at large.

Payal takes a stand

Payal Jangid from Hinsla, Rajasthan, was only 11 when she almost fell victim to child marriage. At an age when her parents should have placed a book in her hands and encouraged her to study, they planned to get her married.

But Payal decided to put up a fight – she refused to be one among the many little girls who are married off at a tender age. She contacted local activists in the village and shared her plight with them. They, in turn contacted Sumedha Kailash, the founder of the Bal Ashram Trust, a rehabilitation and training centre for the Save the Childhood Movement (Bachpan Bachao Andolan)

With her encouragement and support, Payal protested and raised hr voice against her family’s decision. Eventually, her parents relented and her marriage was called off.

But not everyone is this lucky. Several girls in rural India are trapped in the web of child marriage, and Payal wanted to put a stop to this.

A voice for others

Local activists spoke to Payal and other children about the plight of their peers. They also introduced them to the concept of a bal panchayat or child parliament in which local kids are elected to a village council.

Payal was chosen as the president of her village’s child parliament, and she decided to work with the local people and the panchayat to make Hinsla at Bal Mitra Gram (a village where children are withdrawn from labour units and sent to schools) and eradicate child marriage.

She also began organizing rallies and protests with the women and children in the village, providing them a platform to voice their concerns and opinions.

Payal educated people not just about social evils such as child marriage and child labour, but also about the importance of sending children to school.

Her efforts bore fruit when her village was declared a Bal Mitra Gram. Eventually, Payal and her bal panchayat also put end to child marriage in Hinsla.

For her activism, Payal was chosen as a member of the jury for the World’s Children’s Prize in 2013, received the Young Achiever Award by Reebok, and won the Changemaker Award at the annual Goalkeepers Awards by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and UNICEF in 2019.

Payal continues to work for children’s rights.

What makes her special?

Payal raised her voice for her rights and those of others around her. She worked with activists to uplift her village, and as a result, Hinsla is today a child-friendly village and rid of the evil of child marriage.

 

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Bali’s pristine beaches have been a tourist favourite for ages. However, the island was once laced with tonnes of plastic trash. That is until two school-going sisters decided to tackle the plastic pollution in their island.

Inspired by great people

Melati and Isabel Wijsen are sisters born and raised in Bali, Indonesia.

In 2013, when Melati was 12 and Isabel was 10, the sisters learnt about world leaders and change-makers such as Nelson Mandela, Princess Diana and Martin Luther King, in school. After this, the sisters were inspired to do their own bit to change the world into a better place.

They went home and researched on problems in Bali, and decided to focus on the problem of garbage, especially plastic bags that clogged the gutters and piled up on the beach and in rivers.

The sisters, determined to make their island plastic-free, founded a non-governmental organization called Bye Bye Plastic Bags the same year.

Indonesia-the plastic polluter

When the girls founded the Bye Bye Plastic Bags, Indonesia was the second largest plastic polluter in the world after China. It accounted for 10% of the world’s marine plastic pollution.

The Indonesian government had also pledged to invest USD one billion in reducing marine waste by 70% by 2025, as part of the United Nations Clean Seas programme.

Making an impact

After founding their organization, the sisters discussed their ideas in their class and began beach clean-ups and presentations at schools to enlighten local kids about the state of garbage in their country. The girls were instrumental in organizing Bali’s biggest beach clean-up, which witnessed close to 12,000 volunteers!

The sisters also started a pilot programme in a small village called Pererenan in Bali, educating the locals about plastic and its harmful effects on the planet. Soon, they began travelling to different countries to give talks on the subject.

However, their efforts weren’t enough to evoke the interest of the local government. To get its attention, the sisters decided to start a petition to get one lakh signatories. Their petition received tremendous response from people but the local governor still didn’t meet them,

Frustrated, the sisters decided to go on a hunger strike, inspired by a trip to India and a visit to Mahatma Gandhi’s house. And, 24 hours after they started their hunger strike, the governor met them and signed a memorandum of understanding with them to help the people of Bali say no to plastic bags.

Today, the girls continue their efforts to fight plastic pollution and have been named by the Forbes magazine as one among the top inspiring women in Indonesia.

What makes them special?

The sisters identified the problem of plastic pollution in their island and took measures to tackle it. Despite being ignored by the local governor for months, the sisters preserved and finally got the governor to sign a memorandum of understanding.

 

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Music is a way of expression. Many people take to music, either as listeners or performers, in search of inner peace or to vent out their feelings.

Sonita Alizadeh took to rapping when she was 16, bringing out her first video ‘Daughters for Sale’, to raise her voice against child marriage. Now 22, Sonita continues to rap for the cause close to her heart.

What is she fighting for?

Child marriage is a social evil that has persisted for centuries. According to data released by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), as of February 2019, very year close to 12 million girls under 18 are married. Nearly 650 million girls or women alive today were married as children.

While progress has been made, with close to 25 million child marriages prevented in the last decade, there is still a long way to go.

She was almost one of them

Sonita was born in 1996 and grew up in Herat, Afghanistan, under the Taliban rule. When she was six, her family fled from Afghanistan to Iran. Here, he lived her life as an undocumented refugee and a child labourer.

Sonita worked but also educated herself. She learned to read and write at a non-governmental organisation for Afghan refugees in Iran. She took a keen interest in writing and poetry and was inspired by Iranian rapper Yas and American rapper Eminem.

When she was 10, her parents had arranged for her to be married. Sonita was deeply affected by this as her dream was to receive education. She would even see her friends being beaten for refusing child marriage. Thankfully, the arrangement fell out.

During this time, she found solace in music. She started writing pop songs but realising that she had a lot to say, decided to switch to rap.

She recorded songs about being a refugee, about the Afghanistan war, and about being a young woman. But she had to hide her lyrics in her backpack as Iran had a law prohibiting women from singing or rapping.

One day, she entered and won a U.S.-based competition to write a song for a music video encouraging young Afghans to vote. Still living in Tehran, she won $1,000 as prize money.

Daughters for Sale

Sonita thought things would get better when she won the competition. However, her mother, who had returned to Afghanistan, asked her to come home as she had found a future husband for her. Sonita was just 16.

She refused to marry at such a young age and penned down a song called ‘Daughters for Sale’. An Iranian filmmaker, Rokhsareh Ghaemmaghami, who had come to know about Sonita, helped her to make a video and release the same. The music video garnered several views and became an anthem against the child-bride tradition. After the video gained international recognition, Sonita won a full scholarship to a boarding school in the U.S. She even convinced her parents to abort their quest to get her married.

Rokhsareh Ghaemmaghami made a documentary on Sonita’s life, and released it in 2015. The film won the World Documentary Audience Award and Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2016.

Today, Sonita lives in the U.S. and advocates for ending child marriage that has reached curriculum on child marriage high school students in the U.S. Sonita has also spoken at several forums, including the World Bank’s Fragility Forum.

She continues to write songs and wishes to be a “lawyer who can rap”.

What makes her special?

Sonita took to music and used it to raise hr voice against child marriage. Despite the constant challenge she faced, he stood her ground and is today inching closer towards realising her dreams.

 

Picture Credit : Google