Empowering youths in the communities with more career and self-help opportunities is rucial to achieving a better future for all.
This holds true for 23-year-old Miss Chinenye Ogoko, president, Future Blueprints, a social enterprise based in Owerri, the Imo State capital.
She is empowering youths by building their skills as problem solvers and to succeed in a rapidly changing world.
She caught her teeth in social entreprenureship from role models from a variety of backgrounds who have been running viable social enterprises. In impacting skills, she hopes to close the gap in entrepreneurship training among aspiring social entrepreneurs, especially as most of them do not come from business backgrounds.
Besides, Ogoko is encouraged by the fact that embracing the ideology of economic liberation particularlly for youths is one sure way of reducing unemployment and banishing rural hunger and poverty.
The budding entrepeneur tells whoever cares to listen that acquisition of skills holds the key to sucessful business enterprises capable of creating jobs for rural youths.
Intrestingly, Ogoko is not going it alone. She is in collaboration with partners to offer trainings in youth entrepreneurship and self-employment. Consequently, the project is using volunteers, with each volunteer contributing specific expertise. More importantly, she manages to integrate training, post-training coaching and access to funding information, which are key aspects of her success story.
Future Blueprints, the child of Ogoko’s resourceful brain, targets youths with the objective of reducing unemployment, underemployment and poverty. The programme promotes education as well as technical and vocational training. The objective was to offer young people the opportunity to increase their skills, giving them the tools to seek employment or become self-employed at the end of their training.
In doing so, she appreciates the fact that opportunities for economic empowerment such as starting a business or obtaining a job beyond the home are few and far between.
As sign of Okoko’s success in social entreprenurship, she has since spread her tentacles to the United States, where she is now providing information on international organisations that can assist young entrepreneurs access seed funds and microcredit.
Experts like her believe that this is one of the issues compounding rural poverty in Nigeria. She is working on drawing more facilities to prospective women and youth entrepreneurs, equipping them with resources and opportunities needed to launch their small businesses.
While the programme provides a holistic approach for people to learn new crafts and earn income, she also direct her energies towards empowering young women to gain confidence in their abilities and skills and raise their voices to advocate for change and negotiate on stronger terms. She enables young women to form and articulate their career goals so they are better equipped to seek and leverage business opportunities.
Future Blueprints has helped her earn recognition for helping youths gain a deeper understanding of the key issues facing their communities and nation and nurture their civic and political awareness and activism.
Miss Ogoko admitted that her empowerment programmes have created positive and progressive change throughout the village where she has taken her passion to. She sees this, and rightly so, as a huge accomplishment. Indeed, entrepreneurship has become a tool to achieve more inclusive and sustainable economies and societies. Though young Ogoko went into youth work quite early at the age of 16 after being trained as a HIV/AIDS peer-educator by MTN Foundation., she started her first social enterprise ‘Youth of Purpose Network’ (YPN) in 2008.
With YPN raising over 100 youth volunteers and organising motivational cum educational programmes for youths in Irete, Owerri West Local Government Area; Awo-Omamma, Oru East Local Government Area and in Owerri Municipal Council all in Imo State, Miss Ogokon became the toast of existing and prospective social entrepreneurs across Africa.
For instance, she was selected from Africa to represent Nigeria in the Mobilising Youth International Summit of the United Network of Young Peace Builders (UNOY) in Amsterdam, Netherlands in 2014.
Those who did the selection were not disappointed. Ogoko emerged first prize winner in the Pitch for Peace contest held in the same summit.
The prize was a shot in the young entreprenure’s arm. Right now, she is planning on creating an after-school career building and mentoring programme for girls in Nigerian high schools.
Her organisation has trained over 150 young people on entrepreneurship and community development. “We train generally on business development, social entrepreneurship and purpose-discovery. We also connect them to career mentors for guidance. The mentors report to us and even the trainees themselves. We have staff volunteers who check up on them regularly,” she said.
That is not all. As her work continues to grow and spread across the country, she is beginning to use the platform to raise health, gender, and other social issues. As such she is ensuring that young people she is serving are empowered not only to be confident and independent business people, but also socially responsible citizens.
Since she relocated to the US, Miss Ogoko has been interacting with the Nigerian students community there. ”I was just nominated for the African Youth Excellence Entrepreneur of the Year Award.
‘’African Youth Excellence awards young people of African descent who are doing amazing works in their country and Africa but resides in the US,” she explained.
The Ahiazu Mbaise, Imo State born Miss Ogoko, who earned her first degree from the University of Technology, Owerri, currently serves as a Peace Child International’s task force member on Conakry-Rabat Commitment for full youth employment 2030. She is also a scholar at Watson University in Colorado, US.
http://thenationonlineng.net/empowering-youths-through-social-enterprise/