NGOs to Train Nigerian Youths on Ethical Living

In a bid to help close the ethical gap in Nigeria, African Capital Alliance (ACA) Foundation, a non-profit organization, has joined forces with Enactus Nigeria, a Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO), to co-create a social re-engineering intervention program known as the ‘Ethical Living’ project.

The Ethical Living project was designed to inculcate ethical values and foster responsible decision-making among secondary school students, by equipping them with the skills and values they need to become ethical leaders and change agents capable of contributing positively to society.

The project is funded by ACA Foundation, the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) arm of pan-African investment firm African Capital Alliance, while Enactus Nigeria, an acclaimed leadership development-focused NGO that works with young people, is the implementing partner, responsible for creating the training curriculum.

Already, on the strength of the impactful and engaging training curriculum designed by Enactus to catch Nigerian children young, over 2,000 students across 20 public secondary schools in Lagos State have so far been trained.

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While the first set of 10 secondary schools were selected in the project’s pilot phase, which kicked off in Lagos, last year, in partnership with Lagos State Government, through the Ministry of Education, the other 10 schools were selected this year, making a total of 20 schools.

Speaking ahead of this week’s grand finale of the Ethical Living initiative, Head, Corporate Development, Africa Capital Alliance (ACA), Executive, ACA Foundation, Mrs. Uwa Osa-Oboh, said the Ethical Living project aligns with one of the three major objectives of setting up the Foundation, which is ethical leadership; the other two are governance and entrepreneurship.

Osa-Oboh, who has responsible for the Foundation’s operation since 2012 when it was registered, said the model was to look for NGOs that were doing good things, give them a beat of money to supplement whatever they had for their programs.

She said for governance, the Foundation works with the Nigeria Economic Summit Group (NESG), including funding a professional group, which is a product of the NESG that helps the National Assembly clean all the bills they want to pass, do research, and do comparison with similar bills from other climes.

For entrepreneurship, the Foundation works with and supports NGOs like Fate Foundation. The ACA Foundation Executive, however, said with regards to ethical leadership, it works with Enactus.

Her words: “We started supporting Enactus a few years after the Foundation started its operations, and we supported particularly its National Competition. So, we had an insight into Enactus operations and modality for reaching schools.

“Though Enactus programme is about tertiary institutions, it will be very easy to tweak that model for secondary school. We also interacted with Enactus team and we felt that this is a passionate team.

“They are not doing for profile, or posture, they actually believe in what they do. They go to universities, help them with their clubs, and mentor the students. So, the quality of Enactus competition tells you that, there is a lot of hand-holding.

Further justifying the choice of Enactus the project’s implementing partner, Mrs. Osa-Oboh said “because we already knew Enactus and their ecosystem and the way they operated, we are comfortable to work with them, and we consider it and its team trustworthy.”

The Country Director of Enactus Nigeria, Mr. Micheal Ajayi, said ACA Foundation in partnership with Enactus co-created the Ethical Living project when looking for a way to help Nigerians, particularly the youth on ethical living.

Ajayi said as the implementation partner, the first thing Enactus did was to design six training modules, having realised that to teach ethics you can’t just go and be talking; there should be some sort of structure that guides the conversation.

Ajayi explained that “The Ethical Living Club is an interactive program that allows those 50-60 students from last year to also share what they have learnt to other members of that community and also lead the conversation so that through them, we are able to reach at least 50 per cent of the school population

“So, the way we structured the Ethical Living Club is that every month they will have one activity, it can be a case study, it can be a book review. They will review it together and they will share their thoughts and they will engage the wider population of the student community. That way, there will be transfer of knowledge and information from the 50 that we started with to other students in the school.”

He, however, said there is a five-year plan that will take the project to other parts of the country beyond Lagos and beyond the Southwestern region. “The essence really is about teaching ethics to the Nigerian people so that in the next five to 10 years, we will begin to see certain levels of transformation,” he stated.