Olaseni Cole (32)

Olaseni is a General, raising an army of young innovators, inventors, builders and problem-solvers in and from Africa. His project, Empowered Programmers, is an initiative aimed at preparing and equipping children with skills within the tech space helping them solve everyday problems using tech.

As a Youth Corper and ICT Instructor in the ancient city of Ibadan, he was horrified to learn that students received only theoretical instruction about computers and a good number of the students in his classes had never even seen a computer before. He began to take his laptop to school every day and ensured he introduced at least one student a day to a practical understanding of how computers work. After his service year, he decided to scale this idea and created Young Empowered Programmers (YEP!) to introduce children between the ages of 5 and 16 to computer programming.

Through this initiative, he has been able to impact over 3,000 children and teenagers in Lagos and Ogun state, and he is looking to spread this impact across Nigeria and the whole of Africa.

His goal is to equip the beneficiaries of the program with core analytical skills to think outside the box and innovate, thereby tackling future unemployment and creating wealth in the process.

Omozino Eguh (28)

Omozino Eguh found her passion for career guidance and educational psychology after realizing she had picked the wrong university course to study.

Her mission was clear cut; to help children and teens—still grappling with the concept of self-awareness, identity and little knowledge of viable career options that match their talents—make well informed choices.

This was the foundation upon which Yudimy, a career guidance solution adapted for the African context but globally relevant, was laid.

Through Yudimy, Omozino works with children and teenagers to discover their talents and match same to viable career options and courses to study.

Yudimy has impacted the lives of thousands of students collaborating with parents and learning institutions.

Eyitayo Ogunmola (31)

Eyitayo Ogunmola’s interest for the Future of Work; AI, Data Capabilities, Machine Learning and Industry 4.0 inspired him to create Utiva, a platform where talents are developed using business and digital skills. Utiva does this through combining physical learning experiences with a remote learning technology that is powered by AI and Machine Learning.

Through Utiva, Eyitayo has trained over 300 professionals in the last four months.  His goal is to build the largest Data School in Nigeria. Currently, Utiva is known to be the first Product School in Nigeria and is working with over 20,000 students across 30 universities. Eyitayo had been celebrated by UNLEASH, RBS in Scotland, Heriot-Watt University and the US Department of States.

As a young man, he has worked and lived in 6 countries, taken leadership roles in project management, change leadership, strategy deployment, and business development. He has managed projects in Zambia, El-Salvador, Honduras, United Kingdom, United States (DC), Tanzania, Indonesia and of course, Nigeria.

In 2019 Eyitayo was made a fellow of the Global Food fund in the United States.

Seyi Oluyole (27)

Seyi Oluyole, a choreographer and scriptwriter in Nigeria’s commercial city of Lagos, started the Dream Catchers dance group in late 2014 to help street kids and those from low-income families get an education. The idea was dreamed up 10 years earlier when Oluyole’s family moved to a slum in the Ebute-Metta neighbourhood of Lagos after her father lost his job as a banker. Recognising the need, Oluyole says she started requiring that children attend school in order to be in the church’s dance performance. Twenty kids came to the first class, and that’s when the Dream Catchers group officially began. In early March 2018, she and the kids recorded a dance video to a song by Wiz-Kid. The next day, Oluyole posted the video on Instagram and it went viral. Popular blogs, influencers, and other dance channels on social media raved about the performance. By March 10, supermodel Naomi Campbell posted the video on her Instagram page, attracting close to one million likes. And singer Rihanna also shared the video to celebrate her success of crossing two billion worldwide streams on Apple Music. Oluyole’s post got nearly three million likes and more than 50,000 comments. It was also shared by star P Diddy. In the months after the viral video, the Dream Catchers troupe, also known as the Ikorodu Talented Kids, performed in a local TEDx conference and at an event to celebrate Children’s Day organised by the Lagos state government.

Today, 10 children, live with Oluyole in her three-bedroom apartment. She is responsible for their school fees in private primary and secondary schools which ranges from $215 to $315 for each child every school term, and runs for about three months.

Farida Kabir (27)

The global medical industry is a constant state of evolution, as technology evolves and information formerly held as canon is overturned and replaced with newer theses. With such a high turnover of information, doctors in technologicall backward nations run the risk of becoming obsolete in their knowledge. Farida Kabir, a public health scientist, software developer, public speaker and a tech entrepreneur is doing her bit to alleviate this problem. Noticing the lack of professional opportunities for self-improvement for medical professionals, she found OTRAC, an e-learning software for African health practitioners, where doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other professionals in the medical health industry can easily access continuous professional development courses online, allowing them improve themselves at their own pace and at their convenience. Kabir was able to interface OTRAC  to be accessible via web and mobile app and work with in the most inhospitable of environments.

Farida was inspired to create OTRAC because of the huge gap in the capacity of health workers in Nigeria and the dearth of opportunities for self-improvement for those so inclined. Over the years in Nigeria, access to quality training for health workers has been a serious challenge for the health sector, in addition to the high cost of medical training abroad that most practitioners can’t afford. This and also the fact that the available training seminars and conferences are time consuming and flexible, laid the foundation for developing OTRAC. This also created a natural market for our product.

OTRAC enables health workers to learn on the job with their mobile devices irrespective of their locations and also earn a certificate capable of enhancing their career progression. In one year, ORTAC has 8,217 subscribers, 13 educational partners, and 27 courses and 32 facilitators.