A Biography of Meghan McCormick (Founder of OZÉ): Net Worth, Career, Awards, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube

Meghan McCormick is the Co-founder & CEO of OZÉ, a fintech company in Ghana that equips African entrepreneurs to make data-driven decisions to both improve their business performance and access capital.

Meghan McCormick is a systems thinker and strategist, passionate about designing solutions that bring real value to customers, corporations, and communities.

She has spent her career focused geographically on African markets and functionally on innovation strategy.

Life of “Meghan McCormick” At a Glance:

Full Name: Meghan McCormick

Awards: Grand Prize in the Social Impact & Cultural Enterprise Track at the 2018 Harvard President’s Innovation Challenge.

Nationality: Ghanaian

Place of Birth: Ghana

Fields of Expertise: Entrepreneurship

Institutions: Harvard Kennedy School, MIT

Contributions: Founded OZA.

Birth, Education, And Early Life of “Meghan McCormick”:

Meghan McCormick was born in Ghana and both her parents are small business owners and her siblings all work for/run start-ups.

She has been a social entrepreneur for a long time since she founded her first social enterprise at age 10.

Even when she was employed in the Peace Corps, she founded a social enterprise that she ended up scaling. What was new and exciting about founding OZÉ was that it was her first experience working in tech.

She set out to solve the problem of youth unemployment and her journey led her to create a technology-based solution.

For the first time in her life, she was managing people doing a job that she didn’t have the slightest clue how to do.

For example, before they hired a full-time designer, she spent hours watching YouTube videos on how to use design software to create products.

Every day she’s failing forward, learning more, and pushing herself and her team to build a product that transforms what it means to run a small business in Ghana, Nigeria, and beyond.

Meghan McCormick has an MBA from MIT where she was a Legatum Fellow for Entrepreneurship in Emerging Markets and an MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School where she was a Cheng Fellow in the Social Innovation and Change Initiative and a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellow focused on West Africa. She is an expert in human-centered design, social entrepreneurship, and experiential curriculum design.

Career

Meghan McCormick started her work as a Community Economic Development Volunteer in the Peace Corps in Guinea.

During her service, she founded Guinea’s first business accelerator, Dare to Innovate, and scaled it to be French-speaking Africa’s most active small business accelerator.

Outside of her entrepreneurial endeavors, Meghan worked as an Innovation Strategist at Doblin, the innovation unit of Monitor Deloitte.

Additionally, she started Africa’s first eReader library, the BiblioTech. She also founded Guinea’s first business accelerator, Dare to Innovate, and scaled it to be French-speaking Africa’s most active small business accelerator.

DTI has trained over 8000 future entrepreneurs and created more than 500 jobs. Currently, Meghan is the Co-Founder & CEO of OZÉ, a fintech company that equips African entrepreneurs to make data-driven decisions to both improve their business performance and access capital.

Many businesses using the app actively in 2019 were profitable and/or growing. Outside of her entrepreneurial endeavors, Meghan worked as an Innovation Strategist at Doblin, the innovation unit of Monitor Deloitte.

In this capacity, she developed new offerings for Fortune 100 companies including a bank with a large footprint in Africa, and received inventor accreditation on a patent for a new business model for a global industrial giant.

Founding Oze

Meghan McCormick was in the Peace Corps straight out of college in Guinea, and she started their first business accelerator called Dare To Innovate, Osez Innover.

As their portfolio of entrepreneurs grew, they realized that they were not alone in knowing how to get an unemployed youth to find a business idea, eject some capital, and throw them out into the market.

Where everyone is falling is when it comes to making sure that business can grow and thrive. So, she found herself always in Bush taxis, going up the country to sit down with entrepreneurs and figure out how she could improve their business.

In turn, these people would pull out these huge paper ledger books.

She could type all this data into Excel and know what analysis to run, but this is not an effective intervention if you want a business consultant to work with a small portfolio of entrepreneurs.

As a result of this experience, they started making OZÉ as an internal tool at Dare To Innovate, and once they realized that it had commercial potential, they spun it out into a for-profit company.

OZÉ is an app that helps business owners track when money is coming in and leaving, all on the go. The app uses the information you provide real-time updates and alerts about your business’s health.

It’s a habit-forming app that incentivizes SMEs to track meaningful business data that they can then use to access credit.

At the heart of OZÉ is the idea that small business owners need all the support they can get. It first began as an offline solution but Guinea’s Ebola epidemic forced the startup to think about supporting SMEs remotely.

The company took the prototype app to Ghana in 2018. The Ghana pre-launch was a great choice.

OZÉ is now ready to push its refined product across Africa, with Nigeria as its first destination.

By collecting the invoices, receipts, and transaction history of a business, it is easy to develop a loan size that matches its profile. Also, users have to use the app for 90 days to become eligible for loans.

Awards & Achievements

In April 2018 OZÉ won the $75,000 Grand Prize in the Social Impact & Cultural Enterprise Track at the 2018 Harvard President’s Innovation Challenge.

The company approach helped OZÉ win the $75,000 Grand Prize in the Social Impact or Cultural Enterprise Track at the 2018 Harvard President’s Innovation Challenge this spring.