EDACY Team Blog — weekly stories from the EDACY team that we would like to share with you, to help you understand our values better and to meet those behind the scenes that make EDACY possible.
This week: Temitope Ola, Founder of EDACY
I am most honoured to share my story about why I started EDACY, a purpose driven company that takes aim at transforming the lives of young adults in Africa through skill-focused higher education, job placements and new venture development to enable everyone to participate in emerging economic opportunities. I hope that my story will inspire you too to contribute to this purpose and get Africa moving.
EDACY’s story started while I was a growing young adult in south-western Nigeria. I was filled with the ambition to leave the world better than I found it, and to achieve my dreams, the only option I had was to seek the best education possible. Like many young adults of my generation (and still today), I embarked on a migration journey that landed me in Switzerland.
Coming from a middle-class family, my parents could not afford my ambition: foreign exchange was expensive and supporting my livelihood in Switzerland was near mission impossible. While I have been among the fortunate few, my journey had not been without challenges. After my admission to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in 1992 where I started studying to become an engineer, I had to drop out — not for a lucrative startup idea, but because I could not continue to sustain myself nor pay my tuition. This single event changed the trajectory of my life. The precarious experience that followed was painful — from a hopeful world-class-engineer to nobody doing just about anything to survive.
Over the 25 years since then, I’ve had the chance to meet and work with great people who trusted me and handed me unimaginable responsibilities which contributed to my self-confidence about my ability to make a difference in the world — from completing a degree in economics to attending executive programs at prestigious schools like IMD to creating my first startup. All throughout this journey, I never forgot where I started, and education in Africa remained a problem that I wanted to solve.
In 2014, I was named “Technology Pioneer” by the World Economic Forum with my previous startup Koemei — which was applying Artificial Intelligence and Speech Recognition technology to index videos and make them searchable. Our biggest customers were in higher education, giving me an insight into the needs and challenges of disseminating and using video in a learning environment.
Today, when I look at African youths emigrating at the risk of their lives with many drowning in the Mediterranean Sea or dead in the desert, I feel deeply about the inhumanness of the lack of opportunity facing millions of African youths, and want to do all I can to change that destiny. I want every African youth to have the opportunity at home to realize their full potential and not be forced into painful exile because they seek access to quality education and opportunities — their fundamental human right.
One meeting would change everything. In January 2014, I was invited to the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos where I participated in sessions that included Africa’s Next Billion and listened world leaders — at this moment, two things became clear. First, I knew I was ready to go back to Africa, which I had left in 2010 after creating two microfinance banks in Nigeria. Second, I understood in this moment that the sustainable development of Africa would be made possible only through an inclusive education system that does not leave anyone behind, irrespective of their social and economic background.
But the challenge remained — how to create an inclusive education system in the face of Africa’s multiple challenges: poor infrastructure, lack of resources to expand or build new education institutions to satisfy demand, etc.
A meeting later that day in Davos, with Prof. Patrick Aebischer, then President of the Swiss Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), would provide a big part of the answer I needed. Prof. Aebischer had earlier created the “MOOCs for Africa” program to boost higher education in Africa through shared Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). After a few hours of passionate exchange, it was obvious to me that working with EPFL would provide the linkage that I needed to ensure high-quality content, learning technology and best-practices.
After I exited my Koemei in 2015, I started working on my vision, and later joined EPFL to develop FAST (Fast-track Skills Acquisition Training — in technology, engineering and entrepreneurship), the journey that would lead to the creation of EDACY — where an incredible team shares and understands the purpose, and is working hard to create an environment that will help us grow. This is a work in progress that requires the collective wisdom, energy and dedication of all to move us closer to the mission.
I hope that in a few years from now, we will have changed the status quo of education and that our graduates are true game-changers that are transforming their own lives and positively impacting Africa’s next billion, making EDACY the first choice in transformative training that helps young people thrive.
Temitope Ola
Visit our website for more information about our cohort in Software Leadership in Senegal: www.edacy.com and see how you as a student or enterprise can be part of this digital transformation.
