School children that took part in an entrepreneurship project have achieved profits of up to 4110% in just one month.
The Make Your Mark with a Tenner scheme, sponsored by The Entrepreneur Channel, loaned out to participating students £10 to generate as much profit and social impact as possible within a month.
A total of £100,000 was lent to schools across the country, more than £75,000 of which has now been returned.
The highest profit achieved was by Walthamstow School for Girls student, Fazila Dadabhoy, who made £410 with her homemade doughnut maker after persuading a local shop to donate her start-up ingredients. She then donated the profits to charity.
Another participant, Yidan Liu, student at the Manchester Academy, and a director of origami company Cathay Craftz, said:
“Cathay Craftz was fun because it was dead exciting and it gave us a chance to work with real businesses. We got some profit for ourselves but we also got to help students at a South African school, who don’t get the same opportunities as we do.”
The students who clubbed their money together to found Cathay Craftz used some of their £635.73 profit to sponsor five students through secondary education at a South African school.
Oli Barrett, founder of the competition, said the project had shown trusting and empowering teenagers could ‘unleash amazing force for good’.
“Make Your Mark with a Tenner has inspired young people on a grand scale, encouraging teamwork, creativity, social and financial awareness in a real-world environment,” he added. “Entrepreneurship is alive and kicking in the UK!”
Tim Smit CBE, chief executive and co-founder of the Eden Project, said: “The winners should be very proud of themselves, because the achievement is very real.”
“If you want to measure them against ordinary entrepreneurs work out how much they’d have made with a hundred, a thousand and so on. Then you realise how good this is.”
© Crimson Business Ltd. 2007
