2021 in Review: Youthhubafrica Impact in 5 short stories
The year 2021 was a very unpredictable one. With COVID raging across the world, it has made it difficult for non-profits like mine to plan long-term ahead and to navigate organizing physical programs across the country/continent. While there was/is a strong push to hold many programs virtually, I always counter that the majority of the stakeholders that we serve are not online and so, there’s a need to understand how to program during this global pandemic in a way that we do not end up excluding the most vulnerable in our societies and further extend their marginalized status. It is always difficult to focus on a shortlist of programs/projects that brought me the most joy and delivered potentially the best impact in 2021. Knowing that we did a lot of projects, I have attempted to focus on 5 here.
The Margaret Ekpo Youth Fellowship Program: Started in 2020 with funding from the Ford Foundation, this one-year-long fellowship has helped us to train, mentor, and build the capacity of 40 young women across 2 cohorts in 2020 and 2021. The fellowship is designed with three main pillars, advertise and select 20 young women who show promise from a pool, have their feet in women’s rights and feminism, and provide them with the platform, space to network, learn new principles, grow and thrive. We organized 2 retreats with a selection of women-only faculty offering inter-generational dialogues, mentoring, and training; ran a series of webinars in between the opening and closing retreats, then document their voices/thoughts in a sort of fun-to-read scrapbook. The project was an experiment of sorts, but from feedback from alumni, was an experience well worth it. I hope we are able to convince our funders to support future editions of the Fellowship. Gladdened my heart when alumni from the Margaret Ekpo Fellowship came together to jointly pen a petition to the National Assembly, over its failure to vote in support of 5 Women-focused Bills as part of the Constitution Amendment process, using the powering of movement building and organizing they learned and built on, during the fellowship.
DARE Conference 2021: Now in its 3rd edition, our DARE Conference under the theme ‘Éxpanding Margins’, was our biggest and best so far. With the first edition organized in 2017, the DARE conference is turning out to become one of the most interesting and inspiring conferences for young people in Africa. With a wide array of speakers, different session formats, and exciting side attractions, DARE conference stage is fast becoming a highly sought-after opportunity for thought leaders to expand on their ideas with a young audience. This year, we were joined by Dr. Oby Ezekwsili, who spoke virtually from the United States, and one of the most inspiring sessions we had featured Tunde Onakoya, who runs Chess in Slums Africa. We brought Tunde to Abuja with his sensational chess prodigy from Makoko, Ferdinand Maumo who has a learning disorder but somehow is able to master the game of chess and become a champion. Besides the speakers, we had a live Salsa dancing session which became a big hit, VR games, book reading sessions, and several sessions of Kahoot Game! I was in Dakar last December when I heard from someone who attended the DARE conference and said, from the conference, I met someone and discussed an idea which led to a partnership and funding for my organisation. I was super happy. This is the kind of partnership we envisaged when we experimented with the partnerships cafe as part of the 2021 DARE conference. I can’t wait for what 2022 holds in stock for the conference.
The ICT Lab, Government Secondary School Ilorin: It started with a phone call in the middle of the year. A couple of meetings later, we signed partnerships with Huawei, a global technology company to help deliver a computer lab for the Government Secondary School in Ilorin. The School, one of the earliest secondary schools in Nigeria and founded in 1914 has a rich history, and has built a strong alumni community whose work to support the school is very evident everywhere you turn to, in the school’s vast campus. Over three months, we worked to remodel a block of classrooms into a classroom, a modern computer laboratory with 30+1 computers, UPS, tables and chairs and a projector. When we launched the project, commissioned by the H.E. Governor AA, the Governor of Kwara State, I had the pleasure of also interacting with some of the students. The conversation that left me with the biggest impression was that of a 13-year-old boy who told me he wants to be a forensic expert and would like to build a career helping to uncover, arrest and prosecute cybercrime. The opportunity to provide access to computers and learning for these students reminds me always of the saying ‘Talent is evenly distributed in the world, what is missing is opportunities’.
The Child Rights Act, Sokoto State: If you have done work around Legislative advocacy, you understand how frustrating leading such work can be. The major elements that lead to the success of legislative advocacy are controlled by external persons, in this case, elected legislators; who sometimes are unwilling, or the political, cultural and religious circumstances they find themselves in makes it hard for them to take action. The domestication of the child rights acts into law by Nigerian states followed its passage by Nigeria’s National Assembly in 2003. The act originally championed by Late Stella Obasanjo, Nigeria’s first lady, had subsequently been domesticated in 25 states across Nigeria, with 11 outstanding (all in Northern Nigeria). As we began working on getting states to domesticate the CRA, thanks to a generous grant from the Malala Fund, we tried to narrow down why there is a big resistance to the passage in Northern Nigeria, after a series of stakeholders meetings, we got two main answers — There is a big resistance to defining the age of the child as anyone below 18 years, and this resistance is directly linked to a provision that then suggested that anyone below 18 who marries is a child and the marriage deemed as child marriage and unacceptable. In Northern Nigeria, with 22 million child brides which account for 40% of the total within the sub Saharan Africa (UNICEF) and a mixture of cultural and religious reasons to defend why girls can marry at a tender age, the domestication of the child rights act became a very controversial piece of legislation that most legislators would rather not engage with. In Kaduna, Sokoto, and Kano states, where we worked extensively, there were no women amongst the 101 legislators across the 3 states. Despite this myriad of challenges, our campaign to get the CRA domesticated in Sokoto State benefitted from a loose network of committed advocates and champions within Sokoto State, including traditional rulers; as well as the political leadership of the state who developed an appetite to improving girls education by increasing educational budget and strengthening legislation. On the afternoon of November 22nd, 2021, my WhatsApp app beeped. It was a message that the State Legislature had passed the bill into law. I smiled. It has been a 3-year journey. However, like I always say for laws and policies in Nigeria, the main work starts with its implementation. My sleeves are loose again, ready to be rolled for the assignment ahead.
The STEAM Flagship Program
In 2021, in Partnership with the Lelook Bag Academy and sponsorship from the Spotlight Initiative, we launched the STEAM Flagship program, a 6-month intensive hands-on training program for vulnerable women in Abuja to learn the business of bag-making from the Lelook Bag Academy led by multiple award winner Mrs. Chinwe Ezenwa whose Lelook bags made of Ankara fabrics have been sold in more than 20 countries across the world.
The program offered 12 women the opportunity to learn how to use industrial sewing machines to make bags, bag design, business skills, marketing and using technology to market and sell their final products. The program included classes on life skills to improve the self-esteem of the selected women. It was had sessions on sexual and reproductive health and rights amongst others sandwiched into it. The graduation ceremony of the STEAM flagship program coincided with the visit of the Executive Director of UNFPA, Dr. Natalia Kanem to Nigeria. It was all smiles seeing the 12 women complete the program having a mini-exhibition with the bags they created during their journey in the academy. These 12 women will be followed up for the next 12 months, mentored and their businesses monitored for growth and further entrepreneurial linkages.
