By Aydn Parrott
“I try to create content that will better inform, guide and empower other millennials to make healthier life choices” – 2020 Africademics University Ambassador Ernestina Kabukour Kateye
Ernestina Kabukour Kateye launched The Millennial Couch in November 2020 in an effort to create a space that will engage millennials in conversation, primarily based on their leadership, and personal growth and development journeys. “As a life and leadership coach, I try to create content that will better inform, guide and empower other millennials to make healthier life choices,” Ernestina explains.
Ernestina Kabukour Kateye is a Ghanaian passionate about empowering millennials like herself. She says that the The Millennial Couch will hopefully enable her to interact better with her audience and diversify the impact of her blog, GEM (now, GEM Hub) which is an acronym for Globally Empowered Millennial.
She says, “growing up, I had limited exposure to empowering communities which resulted in my developing very low self-esteem, amongst other inferiority complexes.” Ernestina continues: “although I am grateful for my journey, I believe I could have become a ‘much better’ version of myself if I had access to the right opportunities, knowledge and personal growth tools early on in life.” She says, “change is uncomfortable and I am learning to adapt to growth.”
Ernestina’s motto is to get better every single day by seeking enlightenment every single day. “I believe that is one way I can radically empower other youth and hopefully give them the necessary exposure they need to transform their own lives,” Ernestina explains.
Currently running the blog alone, Ernestina says in the future however, she looks forward to collaborating with other ambitious individuals who share the same passion of empowering millennials. “I believe there are several ways to create impact in the lives of others and diversifying one’s mode of communication to fit an audience is a great start,” Ernestina says. She believes a varied audience implies varied preferences, hence her choice of a vlog as a platform.
According to Ernestina, the questions raised on Globally Empowered Millennials are those which tell a credible story about the millennial’s journey. Ernestina says that GEM hopes to ask questions that will resonate with other millennials, encouraging them to start with what they have been afraid to start. These questions include , “how it all began?”, “what kept them going?”, “who/what inspired their journeys?” and “the impact they have created and hope to create” as well as “their struggles and lessons thus far.”
She says GEM attempts to show young leaders in Africa what has been done by other young leaders in Africa in an attempt to help them draw inspiration for their own lives. “Storytelling connects all and sundry in a way that grants the storyteller and the listener the grace to fall, make mistakes, learn (the wisdom we gain from each other’s experiences) and when we learn, to extend the same grace of being kinder, more empathetic and compassionate to everyone else (vulnerable or empowered) we meet on our journey of rising up again,” Ernestina states.
Beyond Covid-19 Ernestina says GEM will be bigger and better. “There are a few necessary adjustments that I will make to my vlog to hopefully ignite other millennials to get involved in the transformation movement,” she says. Ernestina adds, “I look forward to empowering as many millennials as possible. So it will definitely be bigger and better!”
In addition to serving as an Africademics University Ambassador in 2020, Ernestina Kabukour Kateye is a 2019 fellow with the African Future Leaders Fellowship and the Zero-to-One High Impact Leaders Fellowship. She served as a student leader and General Secretary for KNUST Peer Counselling Unit, and is a member of the Youth Empowerment Consortium, Ghana. Requests for collaborations with GEM Hub can be sent to globallyempoweredmillennial@gmail.com
