“I have spent a significant portion of my eighteen years trying to turn new environments into ‘homes.’ YYGS wasn’t an exception. It was the farthest I had ever been from my country yet the closest to home I ever felt in such a short time.”
My friend, Chiro Ogbo (YYAS Zimbabwe ‘17) and myself (YYAS Rwanda ‘17 Alumni), are current students of African Leadership Academy, and earlier this year, Chiro and I were given a research project to proffer solutions to a need in our community. Not surprisingly, we chose something personal. We identified the need for career guidance in Nigeria in order to foster dedication to future career roles. In a bid to find the most feasible solution to this problem, we evaluated our strengths, growth areas and passion. In the end, we developed the Open Peers summer camp.
OpenPeers is a one-week intense summer camp that exposes participants to practical extracurricular activities in the humanities and technology, as well as valuable entrepreneurial and leadership skills.
We kicked off the Pioneer OpenPeers camp in Bishop Okoye Spiritan Secondary School from 22nd to 23rd July, 2019. On the first day, we carried out a workshop on design thinking using the BUILD process. BUILD stands for Believe, Understand, Invent, Listen and Deliver. In this session, students learned to apply BUILD in solving real-life problems. The second day was focused on applying design thinking to discover purpose. A group of 20 students were split into two groups to explore BUILD in either humanities or science and technology. Chiro facilitated the science and technology session where the students learned the physics behind drone assembly using basic components. I facilitated the humanities session where students learned about the five senses used to enhance creative writing.
As a team, we believe hosting this pioneer program was a step in the right direction. Anyone can lay a complaint but not everyone can find solutions to them. We are in the process of moving Open Peers from a project to a Non-Governmental Organization. Using the feedback we received from participants, we aspire to reach a wider audience and revolutionize the outlook of career guidance in Nigeria. Change has indeed started from us.