Legit Businesses Can Still Be Run By Young Ones – Nigeria Young Founders’

As part of the activities for the upcoming conference of the Nigeria Young Founders‘ Week themed ‘The Billion Dollar Conference: Building Africa’s Next Unicorn’, the Nigeria Young Founders Week team leads held a Press Conference with news men. 

Sponsored Post: Young Founders And Entrepreneurs To Converge On OAU Campus In November

Ahead of the maiden edition which is scheduled to hold on Friday, November 3rd, 2023 at Oduduwa Hall by 08:00am, Mr Damilola Mogaji, the Operation lead, Co- founder, Sparkhub and also the Co-lead of the NYFW, Clinton Oyelami, CEO and Co-founder of swift, Sparkhub, Olubode Olatunbosun, Brand and Marketing Lead and Eniola Agunbiade, Publicity and Partnership Lead met with Pressmen to state out the aims and objectives of the maiden edition of the Nigeria Young Founders’ Week.

Speaking to the Pressmen, Mogaji, explained that Sparkhub is known to be a community and body of Young Entrepreneurs, undergraduates on campus across universities in Nigeria and NYFW is a Sparkhub initiative, focused on engaging students and brilliant young people across different campuses and how they can navigate their skills in starting up businesses which will in turn boost their GDP and the country’s economy at large.

According to Damilola Mogaji, the maiden edition of the Nigeria Young Founders’ Week, is solely scheduled to hold on OAU campus to give much honour to most of initiator of the project. Also, he made it known that the event original plan was to be a week long events but due to some challenges that might sprout out on the part of the attendees and on the mission to make the maiden event a glamorous one, the organizers decided in compressing the event to a single day.

He was also excited to make it known that a lot of people from the North, North-Central, East, and Southern part of the country have shown interest in gracing and sparkling the event on Friday, 3rd of November.

Furthermore, when asked on how the event will contribute to the economy landscape, Mogaji together with Clinton explained that the event will create opportunities in Tech(funding and mentorship), startups and business and entrepreneurship, create various updated industries so as to aid the young founders to do better in their careers, and some young people to start something so as not to be idle. According to Mogaji, the NYFW aims at improving the productive capacity of Young minds.

Speaking on the mentoring opportunity, Mogaji explained that the project is not fully guaranting sponsorship of attendees but the project is giving out mentorship through Spark Academy Program, where interested individuals who join the community will have access to enroll in any field of his or her choice such as Data Science, Product Management, Graphics and Web Designing and so on.

Also, through the mentorship opportunity, they will have access to Spark series, a program conducted every week, where trainees will be chanced to  ask direct questions from tutors and mentors who have garnered ten to fifteen years experience in their area of interest.

On what the attendees stand to gain at the event, Mogaji emphatically responded that what the ‘Billion Dollar Conference’ revolves around is actually not that people will make billion dollars on a Literary terms but the aim is to serve attended brain and not mouth and at the end of the event they will have a strong desire to build something that will make them start to have the ‘Billion Dollar Evaluation’, the peak of every startup business. He further gave example of startup businesses that have reached the ‘Billion Dollar Evaluation’, such as Piggyvest, Flutterwave etc.

Also, the event will be an avenue to deposit updated knowledge and inspiration to the students, young people to network with like-minds and lastly make founders know the culture and ethics behind making a startup and building businesses. Majorly, one of the major disasters of startups are the issue of founders not having the right ethics when it comes to managing the business, therefore leading to close down of various startups. Another major concern is the founders of startups being linked to fraud which gives wrong perspective to owners of startups in the country. Therefore, the right ethics must be acquired so that businesses can thrive better in the country.

According to the team leads, ‘Nigeria Young Founders’ is made up of 16 communities to challenge each community to reshape the narratives of youths involvement in various cyber crimes by making the general public know much about what the ‘Nigeria Young Founders’ initiative is all about and assuring people that legit businesses can still be run by young Nigerians.

Citing the EFCC PRO who spoke with students who travelled down to Ibadan to secure the release of their colleagues after the unlawful arrest of students by the agency officials, he said internet fraudsters work at night. Clinton speaking on that, said such narrative and opinion about the young ones need to be changed. 

The organizers admitted that the project is on stand to advocate for the financial support from investors and government for young people, who have the potential to build business and make startup but are financially challenged.