How we are tackling youth unemployment in Africa
Since I was a kid, I always had a lot of empathy for other humans and have always felt a strong need to help people around me but for a very long time, I hadn't found the courage to do anything about this desire. I mean who could I possibly help? I'm just one person, what do I have to offer? You see I felt like this for a long time until something happened…
I was in university at UNT for 2 years going about life as normal, then on a Christmas holiday I came back to Nigeria for Christmas and never went back to Texas… This event was the single biggest event that has ever occurred in my life and it taught me something very important about life which is,
life is unpredictable which is why you have to take full control of the only things you can control, which are your thoughts and actions, everything else is irrelevant.
Getting this message at the age of 21 must have done something to me because since that event I decided to drop out of a second college I started attending in Nigeria and moved to Lagos in attempts to grow the creative technology ecosystem in Nigeria with no funds or prior experience and just the gut intuition that I was created for the job.
So what have I discovered and what is this plan? well, it's simple really. Its called SENPAI
SENPAI — A social Innovative Design company
The reason I dropped out of college was driven by my desire to prove the thesis of senpai and the power of the internet. You see in Africa we are facing quite a unique problem; we are like 20–100 years behind most developed countries; We have mainly been a consumer Nation ( meaning we do not create our own products and solutions we just import it ); and our education system has greatly failed us because it is 20–100 year behind the rest of the world and doesn't teach how us to create solutions or how to innovate.
I know this because I have schooled in Texas and schooled in Nigeria’s best private university, the difference is crazy. But this is only a small percentage of the problem. We have the internet which is even ahead of the best schools in the world. Meaning the global educational system is in real trouble…
All these disparities in education systems would eventually be consumed by one thing, which is the internet. Anyone who is aware of anything is aware of the rise of the gig economy and the disappearance of brick and mortar industries. The internet is coming for all industries.
I saw this coming and decided to place all my bet on using the internet.
So what was the plan?
The plan was very simple, I knew who I was targeting, creative people, I knew how to relate with them the most. I knew they were the most displeased with our current educational system and also were more like to pick up tech skills faster and better than others. why did I know this? Well because I am a creative and I basically was building a plan and company to attract someone like myself.
So I started senpai, senpai started out as a page on Instagram because creatives use Instagram more.
- Build an audience I spent the last 3 years building an audience on my Instagram page, These people where initially artist much like me.
- Build trust After building the page I spent long hours interacting with the community and found out their pain points and needs and their typical behavior.
- Create a training program This was definitely the hardest thing to figure out, I started with a beta test group of 10 people and after A YEAR and alot of data, we figured out how to scale it up and trained over 250 people using simple tools like whatsapp, airtable, dropbox and figma. ( this took roughly 2 years to figure out ). So now the community is full of mostly designers and not just artist.
- Get local and foreign jobs for the people trained This is where we are at right now but as you would image we have been able to place a handfull of talents in companies but there is yet another problem here which is. How many operational companies actually exist in Nigeria to hire all these talents so the options are do like andela and work with more foreign companies or..
- Teach talents how to build business This is where we believe ALOT of the impact would be generated. As you can see this is a very solid and tested structure with a lot of data to back the feasibility but since senpai is fully bootstrapped we are not able to scale this yet…
The plan is to get more of our talents placements and use the income from that to scale or to attract anyone interested in solving this problem with us. This is our theory of change and would allow us to achieve our vision of
Building a gobal commuity of creative people who are working together to design a better future.
We have the passion and expertise to solve the unemployment issue in Africa. We aim to partner with MasterCardFoundation amounts other social organization to help achieve this. If you would love to watch is achieve this task follow Senpai on Instagram and enjoy the view because we are creating the future.
