Why we started The Moris Fund

Our Mission is to improve the quality of education among Nigerians and get them ready for the global and competitive market. Achieving this takes some strong balls and our team have taken it upon ourselves to reach this goal and even do more!

The Nigerian educational system is a mess. There is no argument about it. The Federal and State Universities are nothing to write home about when compared with other International Universities. Even the private institutions charging hefty fees are doing nothing but robbing Nigerians and enriching their owners. It still amazes me how after spending 4 years and earning a Computer Science degree from a supposedly reputable Nigerian University, the student did not one day write one line of code or see what a programming language looks like. This makes me wonder how people graduating with a medical degree actually learn. It’s just alarming!

Every year over 1.5 million people take the Jamb exams. Out of the 117 Universities in the Country including federal, state and private, they can only accommodate at most 40% of these students. The remaining 60% are sent abroad by parents that can afford it or they stay back home either doing nothing thereby leading to increased crime rates or becoming political thugs.

The Government gives thousands of scholarship abroad every year to tackle this problem, what happens here is still a sad tale. I’m saying this because I’ve had a firsthand experience. I and my team were part of a Government scholarship in my State, in as much as we were glad to be a part of an opportunity most people would kill for, the hell we all went through isn’t something we would wish on another person!

It all started from being sent to one of the worst schools located in a village in India. This is a school where the lectures couldn’t even speak good English. How then were they supposed to communicate with us and impact knowledge? I remember the school not even having the course we were sent there to study, it was when we arrived that they did a cut and patch of lecturers from other departments to teach us. That’s how bad it was. The list of every wrong thing we experienced could go on and on for another day; most times we’ve joked about making a movie series of our experience in India because the stories are just too long for a normal movie. After 7 months of serial sufferings, we told ourselves it was enough. We had to go on a hunger strike by letting the canteen cook for us (we were about 170 students in total) and refusing to eat the food. This went on for 3 days, rejecting 3 meals per day. We also appeared for a 3 hour exam for 6 days and at the end we all submitted blank sheets of paper. The school authority had to intervene and call the Government officials to come to India. It was when they came we found out that they didn’t even do a thorough check on the school they sent us to probably because they just wanted to move us out of the country quickly and share the money. They just contracted it to an Indian agent and the agent being out to also make quick money took us to the closest school he could find. After a lot of other major noises we made like calling the Governor or writing to news agencies in Nigeria, they had to finally move us all out of the school to other states. This time, they divided us into 5 different schools in 5 different far away states. Their aim was to make sure our noise can’t be heard incase any other thing comes up now that we’ve been divided into smaller groups. When we moved to the new schools, we had to start from first year again because these new schools refused to accept us from the second year. This was one year of our lives wasted. At the new schools, the problems didn’t stop there, they were more. From delayed monthly stipends (we were owed up to 4 months sometimes) to owing school fees and being temporarily stopped from attending classes. We were just carried to India and left to our own fate. I could keep going on about what happened in India, but I’ll stop here.

We weren’t the only ones that had such experience; other students in other countries were facing the same thing. The people in charge just didn’t care. It was business as usual.

After years of graduation, this led us to think something should be done and that was how we decided to start The Moris Fund. We want to give people the opportunity we never had but wished we did. We don’t want to just take you out of Nigeria and dump you. We want to be there for you. We want to mentor you. We want to empower you. We want to give you resources to make your lives better. These are just a few of the things we wished we had or atleast half of it.

I remember how many times I and my friends had ideas to start up something but never had the resources to do it. I remember how many times we needed advice on what to do and what not to do when you first arrive in a foreign country, but no one was there to tell us. The man that brought us went back the next day. We were on our own!

These are just few of the reasons why we started The Moris Fund. We don’t want to send you abroad because the schools in Nigeria aren’t good enough or because you can’t afford it, we want to empower you with resources and finance to go into entrepreneurship. We want you to come back and become a leader and ready to take the world. We want you to be able to compete with people from Asia and the Americas.

We’re excited about this journey. We hope you are too. Sign up now and you could be one step closer to achieving your dreams.

Click here to read more about what The Moris Fund is about.