Dorica Chanda travelled to the One Young World summit in Manchester in 2022 as an ambassador nominated by the Zambia Institute of Chartered Accountants. She came home with something she had not gone looking for. Not a plan, but the confidence to act on one she had been carrying for years.
Young Dream Radiators takes its name from the idea of radiating light onto young people’s dreams. In this episode Dorica joins host Sinead Donovan to talk about what that looks like in practice: outreach in schools, universities and orphanages across Zambia, a team of eleven volunteers, and a programme she funds from her own salary as an accountant. She talks about the young people who have dropped out of school, the ones dealing with bullying and discrimination, and the ones who simply have nobody in their corner.
Financial literacy sits at the centre of the work, and that is where her profession comes in. Dorica argues that everybody needs the basic language of money, from a university student to a market trader, and that over-borrowing is one of the biggest obstacles she sees. She is candid about the constraint on all of it, which is funding, and about what she is asking the global Chartered Accountancy community to do.
What you will take away
- How a professional qualification can open doors well beyond the day job, and what One Young World offers the people it selects
- What it actually takes to start a foundation from nothing, including how to get through the door of schools and communities that have never heard of you
- Why financial literacy is a social intervention as much as a technical skill, and what over-borrowing does to young people
- A frank assessment of social media’s effect on the next generation, and why face to face mentoring still matters
- What mentors and the wider profession can offer someone building something on their own
- How to keep a volunteer team motivated when there is no funding behind it
About Dorica Chanda
Dorica Chanda is a Chartered Accountant, a member of the Zambia Institute of Chartered Accountants and a One Young World ambassador who attended the 2022 summit in Manchester. She is the founder of Young Dream Radiators, a foundation she established in Zambia to mentor and support young people through school dropout, bullying, discrimination and mental health pressures.
She works with a team of eleven volunteers, running outreach in schools, universities and orphanages, with financial literacy as a central strand. The foundation is opening a centre at Mulungushi University, where she took her degree, and she has had interest from young people in Zimbabwe, Congo and Angola.
