Akonkwa Mubagwa MC/MPA 2026 and Vinay Shukla MPA 2026 are using entrepreneurship to tackle unreliable hospital infrastructure in African health systems and career decisions for teenagers around the world.
Akonkwa Mubagwa and Vinay Shukla are the kind of entrepreneurs the Harvard Innovation Labs was built for—students (and alumni) building ventures that are technically ambitious, grounded in lived experience, and focused on public impact.
As founder of Winko Solar, Akonkwa is building reliable critical-care infrastructure that keeps oxygen, cold chain, and lifesaving equipment running in African hospitals where power outages are the norm. Vinay, through his experiential career discovery platform ExploreYou, is giving teenagers the chance to “test drive” professions through immersive simulations—before they choose a major, take on student debt, or drift into a mismatched career.
Both credit Harvard Kennedy School and its proximity to the Harvard Innovation Labs (iLab) ecosystem with sharpening their ideas, expanding their networks, and turning their ambitious visions into ventures built to work in the real world.
Ahead of the President’s Innovation Challenge Awards Ceremony on Wednesday, May 6, where they will be among the 25 finalists delivering live pitches, Akonkwa and Vinay shared what inspired them to start their ventures, the problems they’re trying to solve, and their future ambitions.
Akonkwa Mubagwa MC/MPA 2026
Founder, Winko Solar
What is Winko Solar, and what inspired you to start it?
Eleven patients die in African hospitals every hour, not because the doctors lack skill, not because the medicine is unavailable, but because the infrastructure is unreliable. Winko Solar builds infrastructure that does not fail when everything else does.
We started with solar—that turned out to be the easy part. The harder thing to solve was the environment around the technology. In most of the hospitals we work with, equipment exists, staff are trained, and care is possible in theory. What breaks it is that nothing runs consistently enough for any of that to matter.
I walked through a lot of hospital wards where the lights go out mid-procedure. Not because the technology does not exist, but because the system around it was never designed to hold. That is what we are fixing. CriticalCareOS is our answer to it: zero downtime for critical care, in places where failure has always been the baseline.
What is Winko Solar’s key problem statement?
Everyone talks about access, but the real problem is reliability.
Here is the thing most people miss: the first layer of oxygen, cold chain, lighting, and the equipment that decides whether a patient lives or dies draws about 10 percent of a hospital’s total power demand—yet it accounts for the majority of life-saving functions.
We do not need to power everything. We need to guarantee that layer, without interruption, full stop. Not access in the abstract. Uptime for the specific systems that determine whether care is even possible.
What is one impact statistic you can share?
In one of our recent deployments, we hit over 365 days of continuous uptime on a fully off-grid system powering critical hospital infrastructure, in a setting where outages were previously routine.
The number matters less than what it represents. Anyone can install, but the question is whether it still works a year later. That is what we optimize for.
What are your future ambitions for Winko Solar?
We are not an energy company; we never were. We are building the distributed, sustainable, and connected infrastructure layer that guarantees zero downtime for critical systems.
Right now, that means oxygen, cold chain, and essential hospital operations. The same guarantee will extend to connectivity and distributed computing as those become load-bearing for care delivery.
Technology keeps improving, but if it cannot run reliably in the environments where it is most needed, it does not matter how good it gets. Their problem of achieving zero downtime critical will be achieved; we have zero doubt. The question is, can it be executed in the next 10 years? We are solving the reliability constraint—at scale.
Vinay Shukla MPA 2026
Founder, ExploreYou
What is ExploreYou, and what inspired you to start it?
ExploreYou is an experiential career discovery platform where students get to test-drive different professions before committing to one. They step into immersive, week-in-the-life simulations, make the decisions that real practitioners make, and walk away with clarity grounded in lived experience rather than guesswork. We meet them in high school—before the major, before the debt, before the first job that quietly becomes a decade.
The inspiration is personal. I was once a starry-eyed kid who wanted to be a corporate lawyer for all the wrong reasons—the prestige, the suits, the idea of it. It took me years inside the profession to realize the work didn’t fit me.
And I kept thinking: if it took me that long, with a law degree already in hand, what chance does a 16-year-old have when their only exposure to a profession is a TV show or a job description? I wanted to build the thing I wish I’d had: a way for any student, regardless of where they come from or who they know, to feel a career before committing years and tuition to it.
What is ExploreYou’s key problem statement?
Teenagers are being asked to make life-shaping decisions about majors, debt, and careers based on stereotypes and screens. Most have never seen what the work they’re choosing actually looks like day-to-day—and the cost of guessing wrong shows up later as anxiety, underemployment, and misalignment.
Career fit shouldn’t be a lottery or blind bet—and it shouldn’t depend on who your parents happen to know.
What is one impact story that captures what ExploreYou is trying to achieve?
While we have both observed and self-reported data showing impact, the moments that have stayed with us are the individual ones.
One 16-year-old in our pilot was torn between law and journalism—both felt like “careers for people good with words,” and she couldn’t tell them apart for her fit. After running our trial lawyer simulation, she came back to her counselor and said: “I didn't realize how specific the writing has to be—every sentence has to defend itself. I love writing, but not like this. Can I try the journalism one next?”
Another student, a 15-year-old from a low-income background, had never heard of an AI safety specialist—it wasn’t a career anyone in his family or school had ever mentioned. He tried the simulation at home, on his own time, with nothing at stake. Halfway through, he reported back saying: “This actually seems pretty cool. Is there someone I could talk to who does this for real?”
These are some of the moments we're building for.
What are your future ambitions for ExploreYou?
We want ExploreYou to become the global standard for experiential career learning—where every young person, anywhere in the world, gets to ask a different question. Not “am I good enough for this job?” but “is this job good enough for me?” That’s the inversion we’re after.
Join the Harvard Innovation Labs for its annual celebration of innovation, community, and entrepreneurship at Harvard. The 2026 Harvard President’s Innovation Challenge Awards Ceremony will be held in Klarman Hall (Soldiers Field Road, Boston, MA) this Wednesday, May 6 at 6 p.m., where 25 finalists deliver live pitches to determine which ventures will receive a share of more than $500,000 in funding, courtesy of the Bertarelli Foundation. The ceremony will also be livestreamed.
Banner image courtesy of Harvard Innovation Labs. Portraits courtesy of Akonkwa Mubagwa and Vinay Shukla.
