Solomon Boakye of The High Street Journal has emerged among the top five winning solutions at the inaugural Africa Development Impact Forum 2026 (ADIF) Policy and Strategy Hackathon, held at the headquarters of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
The initiative is a continent-wide platform focused on advancing practical and implementation-driven solutions to Africa’s job creation and development challenges.
Boakye’s proposal, dubbed Credify, seeks to bridge the gap between education and employment by enabling students to gain verified work experience through real-world projects before graduation. Through a digital competence passport, participants build a trusted record of their skills and performance, while the platform also generates workforce intelligence that can help employers, universities, and policymakers better understand labour market needs and skills demand.
The recognition follows a structured multi-stage process that began with the ADIF 2026 Call-to-Action Challenge, which invited innovators, policymakers, researchers, and development practitioners from across Africa to submit solutions addressing job creation and structural transformation.
Following a competitive review process, the strongest submissions were shortlisted into a Top 10 cohort representing countries including Ghana, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Kenya, South Africa, Togo, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The selected Top 10 participants advanced to the Policy and Strategy Hackathon held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where they worked intensively to refine their proposals, strengthen implementation pathways, and present their solutions before a panel of experts drawn from policy, development, and private sector institutions. From this group, five solutions were selected as the final cohort of winning ideas.
ADIF 2026 marks the inaugural edition of the Africa Development Impact Forum, a new UNECA platform designed to shift the focus from policy dialogue to implementation. Unlike traditional forums, ADIF is structured around a three-stage model consisting of the Call-to-Action Challenge, the Policy and Strategy Hackathon, and a post-event Implementation Clock designed to track, support, and accelerate selected solutions beyond the forum itself.
The theme of the inaugural forum, “Best Practices and Innovative Solutions for Job Creation in Africa,” reflects the continent’s urgent need to create sustainable employment opportunities for its growing youth population.
Through its structured process, ADIF seeks to ensure that promising ideas are not only discussed but also developed into actionable and scalable interventions.
About Boakye Solomon
Boakye Solomon is a business and finance reporter with The High Street Journal, where he focuses on economic policy, markets, and development finance stories that impact lives. He is a graduate of the University of Professional Studies, Accra (UPSA), where he graduated as the best student in Business Economics in his graduating class.
He also went through the PK Amoabeng Leadership Foundation, where he graduated as an outstanding scholar of his year, and currently serves as the Alumni President of the PK Amoabeng Leadership Foundation Ambassador Network.
He has also participated in innovation and problem-solving hackathons, where he focuses on breaking complex challenges into workable solutions and designing impact-driven ideas, including the MTN Business Pulse Challenge with HR Focus and the UNLEASH Innovation Lab (Ghana cohort), a global SDG-focused innovation programme where young innovators design practical solutions to development challenges.
Next Steps
With the hackathon phase concluded, attention now turns to ADIF’s Implementation Clock, the final stage of the forum’s model designed to support the execution and monitoring of selected solutions beyond the event itself.
The Implementation Clock is intended to ensure that promising ideas do not end at the proposal stage but continue through structured follow-up, stakeholder engagement, and implementation tracking. For the selected teams, the next phase will focus on refining their concepts, building partnerships, and advancing pathways toward real-world deployment and measurable impact.
