Mareme Diens
Mareme is the Africa Lead at 500 Global. She is also one of the Forbes Afrique 30under30 2022 nominees. She was the head of international partnerships and relations at Draper University and a member of Draper University Ventures. She had a 3 year experience working previously as a program manager for Draper University, an intensive entrepreneurship program in Silicon Valley before endorsing her current position. She is also current graduate nominee on the board of Trustees of Bennington College, and is involved in the decision making body of the College. She has also worked as the Hackathon Manager at Schoolab, an innovation studio based in Paris that offered consultancy in innovation to top European corporates.
Mareme has created content for innovation workshops and been an active content developer for innovation and entrepreneurship programs. She has spoken at numerous conferences such as the Blockchain Summit, the AI Summit, Afric'Up Summit etc. Mareme has worked for research centers in Paris (CNRS) and Senegal (ISM). After having lived and worked in Senegal, South Africa, France and the United States, she devoted her work to human development and structuring systems that maximize individuals' potential. She has worked with several educational organizations such as ISM Senegal and the Global Scholar Programs in Johannesburg, and has developed with them different educational models in order to promote entrepreneurship, leadership and innovation within the African education system.
She has worked with the Global Startup Ecosystem on the programmation of the Ghana Tech Summit and the Haiti Tech Summit which both took place in 2018. She has also worked with the Lumina Foundation based in Indianapolis through a research project with Bennington College on investigating work integrated learning and the ways we prepare college students for the workforce