Dear Friends,
We’ve had an exciting two months since schools resumed in September, so much so that we didn’t get the chance to write you last month!
The month of September was spent preparing our RCOY winners from the last term for our flagship National Company of the Year competition which held on October 4, 2018. It was an amazing display of innovation, business acumen, and problem-solving skills from nine finalists from nine secondary schools from nine states across Nigeria, and our judges had the most difficult time selecting a winner! Huge thanks to our Board Member, FirstBank Nigeria, for sponsoring the event and to our esteemed judges who were very thorough and fair in the judging process.
The rest of October was a whirlwind of activity from our first time participating in Google’s Africa Code Week to our first time hosting a side event at the Nigerian Economic Summit in Abuja! A month of many wonderful firsts!
Our alumni have been outstanding! From finding out that our Hackathon winning team, and the winner of so many other prestigious tech competitions, was led by a JAN alum to attending the Africa Code Week event which was organized by the Venture Gardens Group and led by another JAN alum, I was absolutely bursting with pride!!! Thank you, Google for making both the Hackathon and the Africa Code Week event possible and allowing our alumni to shine!
We planned to have a small side event at the NES summit to kick off our call to partnership campaign so you can imagine my excitement (and mild panic!) when I got to Abuja and discovered we were on the conference agenda!!! WHOA!!! In less than 24 hours, we had to cater to a bigger crowd, pay for more food and beg Transcorp to rearrange the room to fit more chairs! Thanks to my awesome JAN team in Abuja and those that traveled with me from Lagos, the event was a huge success and we are well on our way to reaching one million youth by 2020 with major new partners and our first Board Member in Abuja!!! Watch this space!!! Huge thanks to our Board Member Accenture for hosting the lunch and to my Chairman, Mr. Niyi Yusuf, who didn’t bat an eyelid when I called to get permission for more food!!! Do you see why I always say we’ve got the best Board Members???
We also have some pretty great partners from Total E&P whose staff went into schools in Port Harcourt and Lagos to teach JAN primary and secondary school entrepreneurship programs throughout September and October to Union Bank whose staff delivered our financial literacy modules to several schools across the country this month. To cap off October, our newest partner FSDH celebrated World Savings Day yesterday by delivering our Savings program to students in Jos! Thank you for heeding the call and paving the way for other partners to bring our financial literacy and entrepreneurship programs to young people across Nigeria!
I’d like to end by congratulating all our Alumni blazing the trail, making all our efforts worth it. If anything, your stories inspire us to do more. I look forward to hearing more stories of success and accomplishment.
Cheers!
Simi Nwogugu.