How to Produce More Start Ups from Nigerian Universities

Faisol is my friend. I met him while he was in 200 Level. Cool. Calm. Collected. He is a reflection of an undergraduate son I would love to have. He is gentle but brilliant and hardworking. I still remember the first day I signaled to him to see me at the university mosque after one of the prayers. I enquired about him. His background. His academic standing.  And that was how we struck a friendship. Once in a while when I met him on campus, I would ask him how he has been faring with his academics. To a very large extent, I have been satisfied with his reported performance.

I became more interested in him when I learnt that he has been running an online boot camp teaching people all across the world in digital and soft skills. He tagged it Digital Skills Boot Camp.  He told me how 4000 people from 13 countries in Africa (Botswana, Ghana, South Africa, Somalia, Zimbabwe etc.) and even Qatar had been past beneficiaries of his passion to share knowledge. I was so impressed that a 19-year-old man could have so discovered his purpose and started fulfilling it even before his university admission. And now that he was on campus, he recruited more of his friends and colleagues to help him achieve his ambition. His gentle mien would not betray such greatness is deposited in him. And he is living it out, on and off campus.

One Wednesday morning earlier this year, I saw Faisol AbdulAkeem at Opolo Global Innovation Hub at Osun State University, Osogbo Campus. I was surprised. On enquiries, he told me he was there to seek information about what it takes to book a space for a brainstorming session with his team. He said he was working with others to float a company to further his objectives of making impact at a higher level. And that announced the birth of Skeeli Africa.

According to him, Skeeli Africa is a digital learning platform whose major aim is to give equal access to promising talents by being a medium through which relevant entry level, digital skills are acquired, improved on, and seamlessly adapted with new technologies. He said the idea came up when he and his team noticed an increasing gap in how new technologies are adapted with current skill sets. He noted that tech industry has become the new oil boom for young men and women. He said his team was aiming at answering the question: how do we help others who do not have the flair for writing codes thrive in their respective fields?

While I congratulate Faisol AbdulAkeem and his team on this new project, I kept musing on if the Nigerian University System has a support structure for young entrepreneurial minds like Faisol. As a young aspiring entrepreneur, he requires support of all kinds- ideation, incubation, product development, funding and scalability. Tell me a university in Nigeria that has that support system on campus. Maybe one or two. Instead many Nigerian universities run the so called entrepreneurship programmes that are heavily focused on vocational skills. We run a university system that trains students on bead making, liquid soap making, tailoring and other vocational skills that one does not need to get to a university to learn. It does not make sense to me. Besides, when the students have learnt the skills, who helps them to navigate the terrain of commercializing the skills, good and services.

Maybe, there was a time those skills were useful. But, this era calls for a more innovative approach to skilling the undergraduates. One, those taught skills do not have the potency to create employment on a larger scale. You see one or two individuals going forward to make sense of and become financially independent through them. Those skills do not have the potency to affect the unemployment rate at scale.

Now, fees are rising without corresponding increase in the value of the education given to the students who are the subscribers. Such kind of increments are business as usual. My thesis is that the institutions should make the education offered comprehensive and effective such that no one graduates without a job. The current educational playbook cannot and will never guarantee that.

Let us tie the entrepreneurship curriculum to either the courses students are subscribed to in the universities or by interest. If I am given admission to read French, teach me proficiency in the language and let me know the business aspect of it. If I go for Political Science, what skills are inherent in this course that I could offer and gain values. If I am a graduate of Computer Science, I should know its adjoining digital skills and should be put on the path that would lead me to making money right from the campus. If I am a banking and finance student, should I not know how to use Fintech to build digital financial funnel for my own local community.  My recent experience shows me that universities in Nigeria do not realise that students pass through their entrepreneurship programmes to fulfil all righteousness. Not because there is really something worthwhile to gain. For those, like Faisol, and I know some of them on campuses I relate with, they are finding their paths to their vision and mission without a support system. The Obafemi Awolowo University is renowned for the thriving startup ecosystem on her campus, how many of these startups that gained traction and scaled did the university deliberately produce? What acknowledgement did Babcock University get for producing Paystack’s founders?  Was it not “we met on campus” mention the university got for producing Ezra and Akinlade who sold their startup to an American company for N76 Billion.

So, what do the Nigerian universities have to do to ensure they improve their profile of producing startups with the potential to become unicorns? The former Vice Chancellor of Bowen University, Iwo, Prof. Joshua Olalekan Ogunwole, in his exit interview in Guardian newspaper gave this golden advice to Nigerian universities on entrepreneurship:

“At the university level, you cannot be talking about entrepreneurship and you are buying sewing machines and whatever for the students. Do that to them at the secondary school or primary school levels. At this tertiary level, you want to raise entrepreneurs who affect the world; who would make global impact and have national relevance. You cannot begin to introduce certain specific skills and say this is what they should know.

What we are saying is this: teach the students under entrepreneurship how to take care of an idea, work on the idea to be an innovation and take all the process so that they can either commercialise it, start up a company with it or whatever. That’s how we see great minds work all over the world. So, university should not be talking about entrepreneurship in the context of wanting to learn confectionery, wanting to be mechanics; universities should be beyond all that.” So, the first step is to admit that the current entrepreneurship programmes are neither relevant nor appropriate for the knowledge economy.

The second and very important point to take note is the advice captured in Adam Adeiza’s reflections on his visit to Covenant University in a 2019 article in Business Day. First, he addressed the philosophy of Covenant University entrepreneurship ecosystem. He observed that “the CU’s entrepreneurship ecosystem has two major components – talents development and incentives.”  He proceeded further to pick the thinking at the heart of the university’s entrepreneurship programme. He wrote:

“They have this philosophy that their students must be so molded that they don’t go back to their parents for anything after graduation. At the heart of CU’s curriculum are development of entrepreneurial mindset and great attitude in students. They don’t necessarily want everyone to be business owners but they do want to make sure that those who would rather work for others are job-ready and that they possess the attitudes that not only attract high-quality jobs, but also ones that keep them in the job when they do get one.” He also said “the university introduced CU Developer Circle, one of the most thriving in the country, where students acquire high premium digital skills that help them unlock Silicon Valley-like jobs while in school. This is also the driving philosophy behind their popular TTG (Towards a Total Graduate) program, where students are mandated to spend few extra weeks immediately after graduation learning critical attitudes, resume development, how to ace an interview, work ethics, being a productive worker, making a difference in the community and so on.”

He was not done yet. He equally identified further the university’s thinking on teaching entrepreneurship. He noted that at the university, “teaching entrepreneurship is more like saying: ‘you can give what you have’. With this, entrepreneurship is not necessarily taught, it’s inspired by people who are travelling the same road. Second, students ‘Get Out of the Building’ a lot, to try their hands on real-life businesses and projects. Finally, On the incentive side, several supporting infrastructures are on ground for both students and faculties to think and act entrepreneurially: free high-speed wifi, a startup lab, regular reward-driven business model competition, institutional facilitation of access to markets and finance as well as sponsorship to Accelerator programs for startups looking to scale.”

Moving forward, the Nigerian University System has to change philosophy, direction and delivery of its entrepreneurship programmes. Nigerian universities, especially as they all warm up to increase their subscription fees, should learn how to manage the abundant talents that are on their campuses and nurture them to become globally relevant startups with high valuation. Doing this will make them produce graduates that could solve national, continental and global problems.