Founder of The Creatives Nigeria, Makoji Kelvin Ibrahim recently hosted a Webinar tagged Track and Triumph with the aim of helping young people set goals with clarity.In this interview with Victoria Onehi of 120edgenews.com, Makoji, a Life Coach and seasoned professional shares his passion for helping young people build capacity and mental wellbeing to help them achieve their goals.
1)Tell us a little about yourself,in the area of education and career?
My name is Makoji Kelvin Ibrahim, I’m the Founder of the Creatives Nigeria. My career and educational background are quite interesting, which has overtime complemented each other and equipped me with the varied perspectives, and insights that contribute to every initiative I get involved in. For my undergraduate degree, I studied Chemistry with Polymer Science in Nigeria, before moving to England for my masters degree in International Business Management, and a short course in International Finance in France. My professional career over the years have spanned from Broadcast Media to Marketing Communications and Advertising, before moving into Technology. Currently I am an IT Product Manager for a Financial Services company where I manage one of their Software Products that services over 90 countries across America, Europe, Asia and Africa.
2) How did the idea of The Creatives Nigeria come about?
Nigeria has a vibrant young population, in fact we have the largest population of youth in the world. About 70% of our population is under 30, with 42% under the age of 15. These presents an opportunity and a challenge, young people struggle to gain employment following their studies, as well as various other factors due socioeconomic factors. This has birthed the need to nurture one’s talent or learn a skill, as a means to survive and express oneself.
Our movies and music have traveled to all parts of the world, these we have achieved with little to no support or funding from the government. In the face of adversity, Nigeria’s creative industry has shown incredible resilience and determination. The Creatives Nigeria was created with a mission to create a hub for Creatives to thrive by sharing resources and opportunities, host networking events, also showcase their works and talents. We are passionate about nurturing talents and advocating for Creative excellence to drive impactful projects that contribute to Nigeria’s cultural and economic development.
3) What made you to come up with this training initiative?Goals and objectives?
We periodically host events in the form of Meetups to bring Creatives together, to network, share ideas, and enable collaborative learning. Track & Triumph is one of our initiatives to support Creatives by equipping them with the necessary skills and tools needed to set goals with clarity and determination. It is the start of a new year, we thought it was a great opportunity to get everyone back to the drawing board to ensure they are able to critically think about their goals and set modalities in place to achieve them with grit and focus.
4) How do think this training impact youth?
One of the biggest things that can sabotage a Creatives’ success is setting unrealistic and no time bound goals. This training provided a focused direction for their artistic endeavors, by fueling inspiration, driving innovation, and allowing participants to develop a roadmap for channeling their creativity with purpose and intention. We tasked participants to carry out a personal SWOT analysis before the event, by analysing their area of strengths, weakness, opportunities to succeed and threats that might mitigate their success. These helped drive their motivation to contribute to the sessions, we believe everyone who attended left with better insight and identified areas of focus to achieve better results this year.
5) Do you have any plan to monitor these trainees?
Participants built roadmaps for their goals for the year. We were particularly focused on setting SMART- Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time bound goals. By adhering to these parameters, we can be sure of better outcomes because our objectives are very specific, with measurable milestones along the way and attainable within a certain time frame. We hope to hold a follow up session in June to check in on everyone and evaluate how much progress has been achieved, and proffer solutions for those who maybe off track or struggling.
6) How trainees came on for this capacity building? Did you select them?
We planned to host 50 Creatives, due to how collaborative and in-depth the sessions were going to be. Most of our participants were from within our community. Also, we shared invites via our social media channels and encouraged everyone to register to attend. We pretty much extended the invitation to everyone both within and outside our community.
7) Are you satisfied with the participation and outcome?
We are very excited about the feedback we’ve received from the attendees and hope to improve on areas where some struggled. Since it was a virtual workshop, many struggled with network connectivity issues, that got in the way of their full participation. We have taken note of these issues and will look into them for subsequent events we host.
8) What is the sustainability plan for this training?
We hope to extend the scope of these sessions based on the excellent feedback we’ve gotten from those who attended. The Creatives Nigeria, as part of our mission plans to collaborate with various organisations within the Creative space, so in the coming months we will be collaborating with more groups, organisations and Government parastatals.
