With zeal and passion to impact his society better than he met it, Chiedozie Igweonu,27, inaugurated his pet the Inspire the Future Project as a corper in 2013.
According to him, the main objective of the project is to provide quality education that will help young people to understand the importance of personal development, academic excellence, positive values and patriotism.
Today, the idea that was conceived to give succour to the young people through mentoring and the restoration of the reading culture has in barely two years grown into a full fledge non-governmental organisation, which he hopes to make Africa’s premier social entrepreneurship project.
Chiedozie Igweonu, who loved to be identified as a Nigerian was born in Maiduguri Borno State 27 years ago and has lived in Abuja since 1990. Chiedozie whose parents are both from Anambra State, had cut a niche even as teenager to help his mates to love books.
Dozie as he fondly called had his primary and secondary education in Abuja, while his first degree in Human Anatomy was obtained at the University of Port Harcourt with various certificates from different institutions around the world.
An avid reader and fairly active on social media, he enjoys working with young people especially if it will have a positive impact on society.
According to him, "In the last 10 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.”
Piqued by the current educational structure with loopholes for creating an army of out of school syndrome, Dozie has this to say. "I have always wanted to be a change driver to the African narration and honestly I believe that we as a nation cannot go far with current structure of our educational sector.
“When I saw the UNICEF report alluded to Nigeria of having more than 10 million out of school kids. I was angry at the failure of the system that was responsible for correcting this national tragedy but I needed to channel my anger to a more positive venture hence the birth of “inspire the future”. Prior to this, I had written down the goals, mission and vision on how to intervene in the rot facing the education sector in Nigeria but the analysis of that report was the fire I needed to act immediately. So what is this project all about?
“Inspire the future” project started as a tour of primary and secondary schools aimed at promoting academic excellence using the models in the very popular book titled “17 Secrets of High Flying Students” written by ace public speaker Fela Durotoye. In our first year, we succeeded in visiting 10 schools across Kogi State and we impacted an average of 1000 students per school. By the second year we expanded by providing a platform for these students to connect to exemplary people who served as mentors to these people, 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 programmes.”
In as much as the young chiedozie wants to transform his project into a world class organisation that will change the society for the better, he has experienced some challenges.
"One of our biggest challenges is knowledge gap, we have situations where we have intentions to carry out a programme but our volunteers do not have all the necessary skill to execute it effectively which leads to retraining them and these things eats into the resources that we could hitherto have used to spread our impact. We also face challenges from schools and parents considering the security situation in the country. Logistics and of course financial but I will rank finance lowest on our scale needs because I am a firm believer that with the right knowledge we should device better and more cost effective means to achieve our purpose.”
“The knowledge gap issue could be solved if we have the facilities to train some of our volunteers, and we hunt for volunteers that have specific skills which fit into our goals and mission. We also had to involve community leaders who help us in negotiating a softer landing with schools and authorities. We are implementing a more sustainable financial model to help us achieve our goals.”
But, when asked the motivation that kept the project running against odds, he enthused, "I remember running into a student we had mentored while I was shopping and she could not hide her joy so she dragged me to her parents and showed me her WAEC results which she passed with flying colours. I have been to some places where people talk about the project without a clue that I lead the team that executed it.
“And about the funding, initially we got funds primarily from personal savings, friends and donors who believe in what we believe in. We exploit social media to canvass for funds and there are also people and entities who have allowed us leverage their platforms thus far. We have never received grants and donations from major bodies responsible for such but we are working on that and more importantly we are testing a sustainable model that will generate the resources we need to execute our programmes.”
On the criteria he is using to selecting beneficiaries, he said, "We work closely with professionals who use standard baseline assessment for recommending beneficiaries. We do not discriminate based on tribe or religion. We try to be fair to all.”
One could see inner agitation in him to see that all Nigerians of school age should be back in school even as he noted that his vision for “Inspire the Future “would begin to build the bridge that will guarantee access to quality education for the next generation while vowing to continuously ensured that best practices in record keeping is maintained at all times to guarantee the efficient use of the resources.
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