Sergio Medina

Mastercard Foundation & Jacobs Foundation 2018 - 2020

Alumni

Legatum Fellow

From:

United States of America

Sector:

IT/Telecom

Location:

Kenya

Degree:

MBA, Sloan School of Management

Sergio’s venture, RISE, is a social enterprise that built a multi-sided platform that supports education and nutrition for refugee children.  In the past year, RISE capped off a multi-year and multi-national Proof of Concept culminating in successful field tests in the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya.

Worldwide, there are 7.4 million school-age refugee children and 4 million of them don’t attend school on a regular basis.  There are only eight girls in school for every ten boys.  RISE is using technology to solve these problems and support the school meals program that serves as a major education incentive.

RISE’s primary beneficiaries are refugee children and their customers are aid agencies.  Field workers using RISE’s platform find their work optimized: allowing them to better communicate value to their funders, reallocate resources based on time-savings, and deliver services to children faster.

RISE was born out of frustration with the status quo.  Its founder and CEO, Sergio Medina, spent several years coordinating humanitarian aid services for children in refugee camps across East Africa; relying on manual processes.  As a Social Worker by training, his mandate was to get tens of thousands of children help expeditiously.  He found that building a tech-enabled solution was the pathway to have the most impact for the most number of children the fastest.  To catapult this idea, Sergio was drawn to MIT where he is pursuing an Executive MBA at Sloan School of Management and where RISE is well on their pathway to global impact.