PhD Candidates

Esinam Adorkor

Esinam Adorkor (Ghana) is a Program Lead at the Mastercard Foundation in Accra. Her work focuses on innovation and youth partnerships. She leads the Employee Innovation Fund, which enables employees to propose and test ideas that support the Foundation’s mission.

Esinam supports ideas from their initial development through assessment, selection, funded pilots and the learning that follows. She helps colleagues develop proposals and guides projects through implementation, reviewing progress and budgets and helping teams address challenges. She draws out lessons to inform decisions about which approaches should be adapted, taken further or brought to a close. She also improves the Fund’s processes to support experimentation while maintaining clear expectations for delivery and learning.

Previously, Esinam helped establish the Foundation’s innovation practice in Ghana. She supported partnerships and approaches to identify and test new ways of creating employment opportunities for young Ghanaians. She later supported digital economy programmes in Nigeria, working with partners on pathways into employment and entrepreneurship through digital skills, services and digitally enabled work. Earlier in her career, she worked in new product development at Bboxx in Rwanda and Vodafone in Ghana. These roles gave her experience in understanding customer needs, translating them into products and services, and navigating the organisational and commercial decisions involved in bringing new offerings to market.

She holds a BSc in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Ghana, an MBA from Cranfield University in the United Kingdom, completed in 2017, and a certificate in innovation from INSEAD. Her studies reflect a growing interest in how ideas become practical solutions. Engineering taught her to break down complex problems and understand how the parts of a system work together. Her MBA broadened her perspective to include how a solution is organised, financed and sustained. Her studies in innovation brought these interests together, particularly around how ideas are developed, tested and put into practice.

Her research focuses on how funders identify and assess promising innovations in low-income markets with limited infrastructure, particularly in African contexts. She is interested in how they make decisions when information is limited and the available evidence may not fully show whether an innovation will be adopted or sustained.

Esinam aims to explore how venture capital firms, development finance institutions and philanthropic funders make these judgements, and how their assessment practices relate to the realities of the innovations they support. She is particularly interested in whether the challenges lie in the information available, the criteria used, the interpretation of evidence or the organisational processes behind funding decisions. Through her research, she hopes to contribute evidence that helps funders make more informed decisions that account for local conditions.