Ogunrinde: Economic Empowerment Requires Ending Waste

Omowale Ogunrinde: Economic Empowerment Requires Ending Waste

Editor's note: Between 2008 and 2009, Omowale Ogunrinde of Nigeria organized the collection and distribution of more than 15,000 books and educational materials to 18 public schools in her community. She currently serves as the executive director and chief executive officer of the Foundation for Skills Development, a vocational, technical and entrepreneurship training center for unemployed adults, youth and the physically challenged.

Most of us believe that government is there to meet our personal needs, but our expectations are never met. Hence the gap between the poor and the rich has become so enormous, and there is so much waste by those who are considered privileged.

At the Foundation for Skills Development, our work is geared toward encouraging, motivating and empowering women and youths to be economically conscious and economically empowered. The policy that guides our work is to teach our beneficiaries a "no waste strategy." In our vocational, entrepreneurship and educational schemes, we are all conscious that there must be no waste.

The educational project is simply to collect old educational materials from homes and private schools and distribute them to the pupils in the public schools. Oftentimes these students have never seen some of these textbooks before.

The vocational project helps teach youth and women in particular those practical skills that would help them to start small businesses that they can grow at their own pace, while they gradually become a relevant economic contributor to the home and society.

The entrepreneurship training is an amazing project. Although we started on a very small scale, it has grown to attract over 300 women for each training cycle. We bring resource persons from the public and private sectors to teach women practical business skills relevant to our environment. At these seminars we also bring in entrepreneurs who started their businesses around the kitchen table and have grown to international standards to be qualified as big companies. They simply tell their stories.

The work we do seems to be advocacy which government ought to be doing, yet we are not government funded. We create a means for people to earn an income and create awareness for people to grow their business ideas. Most especially, we work to reduce poverty levels among women and society at large.

We know that it is only the economically empowered woman who can have a political voice. There is much work to do in this area if truly we want women to be politically relevant in our society.

Our work is yet to get the kind of support we expect from the public and private sectors, but our success stories confirm that we are on the right path to reducing the endemic levels of poverty among women and giving pupils in the public schools better standards of education, reading in particular.

ENDS

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