WHEN I STUMBLED UPON SOME OPRAH WINFREYS OF OUR TIME…

"For many women, success is still linked to what a man can add to your life. I often tell my female friends that it's important for women to find themselves. You need to explore."
- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Two things…Firstly, I have a very short concentration span. My bosses have complained time and again about my inability to actually sit and concentrate in a meeting when I am not the one doing the talking or being addressed. I’ll usually just start fiddling with my phone- browsing anything that comes to my mind or just chatting online with a friend or doing both- or I’ll excuse myself briefly- dash into my office and resume whatever work I was doing before the meeting- and then return after a convenient period has elapsed. My colleagues have even come to notice it and nowadays my bosses just smile when I come up with one of my silly excuses and just let me be. It’s not behaviour I’m proud or ashamed of, it’s a habit I don’t even know when I cultivated but has become part of me. I just can’t be doing one thing at a time for very long without adding a second (and third) thing to the fray, like seeing a movie in the cinema and browsing Facebook simultaneously, and also racking my brain on how to solve that lingering work issue! Secondly, I’m not a fan of seminars and talk shows. Unstimulating long talk bores the life out of me so I usually avoid all these advertised talks and seminars on money making, entrepreneurship, marriage bla bla bla… I’ll rather just read a book than sit down and listen to the words in it.  Really, I think the only place I can stand long talk for very long, out of reverence for God, is in the church. 

But recently, I stumbled upon a WomenRISE seminar being hosted by Co-Creation Hub’s (more commonly known as CCHub) for aspiring or budding female technopreneurs titled “How To Apply For And Get Business Awards.“ I wasn't interested initially but I later felt, “Well, since the venue isn’t very far from where I work, maybe I’ll just look in and find out what the speakers have to say. Plus they are female speakers who seem to have achieved quite a lot so lemme see what and what I can glean from their experiences since entering the Nigerian business scene. If it gets too boring, I’ll calmly excuse myself and find my way.” So I went, albeit an hour later than the starting time. And I sat down with about 12 other young women for two straight hours and listened- awed and attentive- to three young female Nigerian technopreneurs who have each won business grants for their strides thus far, using technology to do very innovative stuff and solve some of the problems in our society.

I missed most of the first speaker’s (Bilikiss Adebiyi-Abiola) speech but from the follow-up questions which she answered, I learnt she is a Cartier Women Initiative Awards 2013 Laureate (I know it sounds acada-ish but it’s actually a $20k business grant we are talking about here) and founder of Wecyclers, a waste-recycling company is Lagos. She talked a great deal about how to go about filling out business grant forms, dishing out tips I would never have thought about. 

The second speaker, Damilola Solesi, founder of Smids Animation and 2013 YouWin beneficiary talked about the challenges of starting up a new business as a rookie in Nigeria and how she is still weathering the storms. I’ll say she challenged me the most because according to her, she knew she was going to do graphics even before she entered secondary school; she looked forward to doing graphics courses as a Computer Science undergraduate and was very disappointed when she could only do one very archaic (trust 9ja government tertiary institutions naa) graphics course in school; she used her NYSC allawee to register her business (if you know the yawning gap between how much it takes to register a business with  the CAC and the NYSC allawee, then you’ll understand); she rented an ‘office’ space at CCHub over a year- the office is in apostrophe 'cos in CCHub, office refers to a workstation where you can plug in your PC to power and internet access to work on ICT jobs for your clients; there seemed to be virtually no market in Nigeria for what she had to offer; before YouWin, she applied for all business grants she could find without success plus this very touching confession from her, “If you had seen me this time last year, I wasn’t smiling like this at all.” 

The third speaker, Saze Osayande, who is a 2013 TechWomen Emerging Leader and the founder of 4twenty3, a digital marketing agency ( who also started her business from CCHub incidentally) spoke about coping with the challenges of being a female entrepreneur in a society where females’ opinions are most times not considered valuable, how she applied for and got the TechWomen Emerging Leader slot and her exciting experience in the programme and how she’s been able to leverage her experience from previous job positions and the TechWomen network to move her company to greater heights. She equally encouraged us not to be in a rush for greatness but that with steady focus and hardwork, we will get to the top of the success ladder. She reminded us that not all of us would be entrepreneurs but the most important thing should be making a success out of our career paths and living a fulfilled life.

Truth be told, I expected to hear motivating stuff, but not this motivating. Right now, I’m more than gingered to do equally motivating things with my life and career. Because I want to be these women in few years’ time, using my time, money, skills and achievements to encourage younger ladies to step up and make a difference in their communities, our society, Africa and the world.  I only shared this because I hope someone else is gingered to start doing something, or if you are already, to keep up with the good work and to start trying out those business grants’ applications too. And something else I noticed, they each had a ring-ed finger (if you get what I mean) so yes, they are doing the career and marriage simultaneously- and well, hopefully.

Thank you very much WomenRISE, thank you very much Co-Creation Hub for this very eye-opening and knowledge-enriching experience. I guess I’ll try stimulating talks like this more often from now on. For now, it's time to walk the talk.