Mbari Uno in Six Months; an Impact Report

Mbari Uno’s first six months of operations featured an array of activities in design showcase and education. The impact of these activities reached over forty-one thousand persons across the establishment’s diverse platforms. The Mbari Uno website has also become a robust design directory chronicling design activities across twenty-four (24) design disciplines from forty-four (44) countries across the continent; making it one of Africa’s largest online design directory. The directory is an online archive of the most awe-inspiring works done in architecture, product design, fashion design, digital design, advertising, content design, corporate design and much more. It also features a listing of design hubs, publications, and events clusters across sub-Saharan Africa.

The Mbari Uno Hub has played host to twenty-one (21) workshop events and five (5) exhibitions as part of her Enterprise projects. These events brought a total of 1,236 people to the hub. The sessions were a forum for learning, knowledge exchange, and networking.

The Workshops featured some of the continent’s brightest and most successful designers. It was a chance for design enthusiasts and entrepreneurs to learn from mentors such as Tosin Oshinowo, Adebayo Oke-Lawal, Charles O’Tudor, Adebola Williams, Lanre Adisa and a host of others. Also, the Exhibitions were a platform of inspiration. They featured the works of celebrated artists, photographers, and designers such as Laolu Obende, Yemi Fetch, Chuma Anagbado, Jimmy Boro, and others.

With the introduction of the Mbari Uno Collective (MUC)–a forum of designers and community using design thinking to innovate solutions that positively impact social well-being–the Mbari Uno community is only poised to grow bigger. Mbari Uno Collective brings about a repositioning that enhances the Development angle of the establishment’s mandate. Beyond Design Education and Showcase, the idea behind MUC is to create viable solutions via ideation and product development.