Founder of an entrepreneurship and leadership non-governmental organisation, Inspire the Future, Chiedozie Igweonu has been training Kogi State youths in skills and leadership.
Spurred by a passion to make an impact on the society, Dozie, as he is better known, started his pet project aged 27, while undergoing the compulsory national youth service in 2013. Today, the Inspire the Future Project is gradually growing into a full-fledged NGO which he believes in a few years’ time will be Africa’s premier social entrepreneurship project.
Born in Maiduguri, Borno State, Dozie had his primary and secondary school education in Abuja, where his parents who are both from Anambra State lived and his first degree in Human Anatomy at the University of Port Harcourt, Rivers State.
He described himself as an avid reader who is fairly active on the social media.
“I love working with young people,” he enthused.
According to him: “I enjoy working with young people especially if it will have a positive impact on society. In the last ten years I have served in the teams responsible for projects like “The Undergraduate Business Conference”, “The Catalyst Youth Development Platform”, “Vote
or Shut-up Electoral Education Initiative and Youth Advance and Development”, in some states which has impacted more than 15, 000 youth in the last two years.
“I have always wanted to be a positive drive to change the African narration and honestly I believe that we as a nation cannot go far with the current structure of our educational sector. Then, I saw the UNICEF report where they alluded that there are more than 10 million out of school kids in Nigeria alone. I was angry at the failure of the system that was responsible for this ill but I needed to channel my anger to a more positive venture hence “Inspire the Future” was born.
Prior to this I had written down the goals, mission and vision on how to intervene in the quagmire facing the education sector in Nigeria but the analysis of that report was the fire I needed to act immediately”.
Speaking on what the project is about, he said it started as a tour of primary and secondary schools and was aimed at promoting academic excellence using the models in a popular book titled: “17 secrets of high flying students”, written by Fela Durotoye.
He continued, “In our first year, we succeeded in visiting 10 schools situated in Kogi State and we impacted an average of 1,000 per pupils. By the second year we expanded by providing a platform for these pupils to connect to exemplary people who served as mentors to them.
We also provided after school mentorship training for a select few. In our third year we had reached more than 20,000 young people. As our impact increased over the years, we did some major restructuring and reassessed some of our short and long term goals which includes
getting at least 500 underprivileged kids, especially in educationally less developed states in the North back to school. We are also overhauling our model to a more sustainable social entrepreneurship structure, meaning that in the nearest future we will be less dependent on donations but we would have the capacity to generate the necessary resources required to carry out our programs”.
He listed the biggest challenge confronting the initiative as knowledge gap.
