There isn’t just one thing that UConn student Jenevera Abena Addai Mensah is passionate about.
There’s many.
She loves color and art – choosing to wear bright reds, orange, and yellow – and bold patterns, a celebration of her African culture, she says.
“I feel like color makes everything more fun,” says Mensah, who was born and raised in Ghana, but lived in California and attended high school in Texas before coming to UConn last year. “I just love color.”
She’s passionate about her community, and about giving back to those in need in Ghana, women in particular.
“There’s something called the ‘no bed syndrome,’ where the hospitals in Ghana don’t have beds,” Mensah explains. “To the point that when women go into the hospital to give birth, they don’t have the resources to be able to deliver their child.”
And she’s passionate about building something of her own.
“My family is full of interesting entrepreneurs,” she says, “so everywhere I always went, they said I had a business mind.”
In the past, her “side hustles” have been things like a jewelry-making business, where she made beaded anklets and bracelets – she still has a stock of beads stashed away. During COVID, she started making lip gloss.
“That didn’t work out,” she laughs.
At one point, she says she thought she wanted to braid hair, but found it took too much time away from school.
“My education comes first,” she says. “That’s one thing my parents instilled in me. I don’t play about school.”
Now a sophomore at UConn, Mensah has her sights set a bit higher than bracelets and lip gloss. She’s been working for the past year to build a new venture, with expecting mothers in Ghana in mind.
And she’s done so with the help of the Werth Innovators Program at the Werth Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, which has been helping first-year women, in particular, find their entrepreneurial footing for the past six years.