Aware of the plights of Nigerian youths with regards to employment, Adaeze Udom graduated from the university and plunged into entrepreneurship and writing instead of waiting for a white collar job. She founded Green Hope Youth Empowerment Initiative. The three arms of the initiative — publishing, not-for-profit scheme, and awards have been a blessing to Nigerian youths. The organisation’s annual Hope Awards and the presentation of Udom’s first book, Academic Excellence is Achievable By You, was successfully held in Abuja recently. She spoke with EBERE AMEH after the event.
ADAEZE Udom conceived the Green Hope Youth Empowerment Initiative to serve as a vehicle for social change among Nigerian youths. It focuses solely on the creation of a platform for youth empowerment, emancipation, encouragement and transformation, which, according to her, means “giving the necessary skills Nigerian youths need to withstand and to turn to their advantage the ills of the society like unemployment, rigid educational system, corruption, poor infrastructure and so on.”
The organisation, which she describes as “an umbrella for so many dreams yet unborn,” has grown bigger to focus on other areas of concern.
“During my Queen’s College days in the dormitory, when my schoolmates’ items or money got lost, they would always come to me, tell me the story and I would somehow figure out who stole it. This happened uncountable times and they would search and find the item with the person I suspected.
“In Covenant University, I joined the Word Study Group, which handles the weekly publication of the cell meetings, and I also did various businesses in school and supported my schoolmates financially.
“Green Hope has metamorphosed into Green Hope Awards, Green Hope magazine, Inspire free bulletin, Green Hope Empower Me workshops and so on. These aspects of Green Hope represent a sole purpose of igniting a purposeful life among Nigerian youths. It is all about empowerment, recognising excellence, creativity and growth against all odds,” she says.
Adaeze, who took to entrepreneurship right after graduation wonders why youths are still searching for paid employment, in spite of the prevailing job market.
“I’m actually working on a new book titled Project Grow Nigeria. It speaks about the rise of the information age and the implications for the Nigerian educational sector and much more.
“It’s kind of funny to me, when I bump into a friend or colleague and as we exchange pleasantries, I ask, ‘Where do you work now?’ and he or she replies, ‘I don’t work, I run my own business.’ My reaction in such an encounter is, ‘Your business is a work; so, you work.’ “”
“Employment was restricted to a white collar job in the industrial age, but this is the information age, where jobs have transcended from what I termed the “power five”, where if you are not a doctor, you are a lawyer, a banker, a lecturer or an engineer. In the information age, there has been a trans from “power five” to “power ideas”, where the game makers are those that pursue their talents, aspirations and dreams and not the best jobs. In this age of “power ideas” whatever your career is, what matters most for your degree of success is your mind power, discipline, creativity, interpersonal skills, and hardwork, which always meet a share of luck.
“And in this book I do not try to undermine the “power five” but to bring to attention, the need for the educational system to embrace the new culture of things,” she submits.
She decided to take this year’s Hope Awards event to Abuja because “we intended shifting the attention from Lagos, and making the youths know that Green Hope is not a Lagos foundation, though based in Lagos, but a Nigerian foundation for Nigerians.”
The award recipients included Chris Oputa of Studio 24, Samiah Onyekan who won the Igniting Change Award, The PR Company, The Runway Team and Wukeh Egem-Odey who won the Academic Excellence Award.
The award, Adaeze explains, “recognises excellence, entrepreneurship, innovation, change and growth, creativity and so on among young Nigerians. Qualifiers must have distinguished themselves in their various fields, having excelled and given reasons beyond all reasonable doubts why they should be recognised and encouraged by the Green Hope Award. The awardees as well become models of growth and development; this is what we also aim to achieve.”
At the award ceremony, she released the book titled Academic Excellence is Achievable By You, which she boasts is different from all other success books.
She says, “I wrote the book as a manuscript to be given during the Green Hope Empower Me Tour workshop held in Lagos, for the least performing students after which, I decided to publish it. The proceeds have already been used to print out more books that will be freely given to under-performing students in academics. I put it in that way because we must bear in mind that a student under-performing in academics might be the best in music, arts, sports and other areas.
“The book is different from other books because it is more like a heart-to-heart talk between two siblings on reforming the mind, and achieving excellence. It goes down to the basics, and deals with the problem with brevity and simple language for easy assimilation.”
As a youth leader, her advice is that government should re-evaluate the indices of Nigerian education and certification. My upcoming book, Project Grow Nigeria, states that the two strategic indices for development in Nigeria are constant electricity and reformed education.
“It is high time Nigeria abandoned the fabrics of westernised standards of education and drew up its own future by revaluating what its students are taught in school as regards its future implications. A child learns the definition of acres or plot of land but has no clue in reality of how large or small an acre is on a real landscape. Courses like carpentry, fish farming, fashion, photography, event management, risk evaluation, should be streamlined into the educational system as either full B.Sc courses or differentiated as minor and major courses.
“Graduates should not finish from school and blot out, ‘now am done with school, let me drop this certificate and do what I have always loved.’ What they really love is what they should be trained practically to do and not just theoretically.
“The frontiers of education must expose itself to the sunrays of this new age.
“It is not about having entrepreneurship courses after school; it is about tailoring entrepreneurship into the courses offered in school by the students, discovering first and foremost, what these young ones want to be from primary and secondary school, and developing a programme for learning them in the universities.”
According to her, youth restiveness, militancy, terrorism and kidnapping and other problems are on the rise in Nigeria. Opening youths up to opportunities available to their counterparts will stem the tide, she says.
“From my point of view, I would separate terrorism from kidnapping, restiveness and militancy. Although the former and the latter have a meeting point, the former stems from the political agenda of opposition group(s) against the present government and the latter stems from the disadvantages the youths of Nigeria face.
“An international report states that Nigeria is the worst country to be born in 2013. It doesn’t take rocket science to know that Nigeria is rated the worst because based on the viability of its resources, both natural and otherwise, its population, its freedom from natural disasters and man-made ones like wars vis-à-vis the plight of her people, Nigeria is expected to be among the most developed economies in the world. Period! We all know that why we were rated as the least is because of the singular problem of corruption and siphoning of national funds meant for the general development of the country.
“You want the youths to be restful, and more accommodating, to stop kidnapping and militancy? Simple, give them the same opportunities their mates have in other countries as blessed as ours. That could sound like a far cry, but if these youths see that tremendous efforts are being made by the government, they would change their ways immediately. Nevertheless, also inclusive of the cure of this crisis is information through the media, and formal and informal education in schools, churches, and families, among others.”
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