Lagos trains 183 school teachers on alternative to white collar job

FOLLOWING the social and economic lockdown in the country occasioned by the  COVID-19 pandemic, a  Lagos-based group known as  Kindle Africa Empowerment  Initiative in collaboration with  Dreams from the Slums Initiative organisation organised a free vocational training school for school teachers in  Lagos.

The training was to expose them to  private  income generation strategies, an alternative to the white-collar  job

The development led to an intense entrepreneurial education intended to expose the learners to various vocational skills where no fewer than 183 participants had benefited.

Speaking at the second graduation ceremony held at the Slums Initiative Hall, Ajegunle, Lagos,  the founder, Kindle Africa Empowerment  Initiative, a non-governmental organisation (NGO), Mrs  Olorunfunmi Adebajo Olafimihan,  declared that the  NGO was established with a mission to eradicate poverty by improving access to education for women and children in slum communities in the country.

According to her, the empowerment programme was targeted at vulnerable women to empower them with vocational skills with a scholarship for basic education in the slum community as well as free adult education programmes.

Her word: “Kindle  Africa targets communities where people have very limited educational attainments to provide vocational skills as a tool to eradicate poverty in those communities, and we also provide scholarship for basic education and training for teachers in the low-cost schools in the communities.

“We have realised that schools in these communities could hardly pay teachers’ salary during the COVID-19 pandemic; we introduced vocational training for them to be self-sufficient in the community aside from the palliative services, which we extended to them periodically. The vocational training we engaged them are viable and combinable with their teaching profession.

“Some of the vocational training include soup making, barbing, catering, wig making, content development, social media marketing and some other online trades. We believe that with the vocational training knowledge one can be self-independent and can also be quickly absorbed into the labour market. We organised the training across all the slum communities in Lagos metropolis. So far, no fewer than 183 teachers have benefited from the training programme and 100 of them were from Ajegunle community.

“The training was free for the selected participants. We also have the provision of soft a loan for them, with a grant of N20,000 for the best-performed learners in some of the skills to encourage them. We had sponsorship from some organisations which belief in our dreams to organise the programme.”

Two of the participants who spoke with Education Tribune about the training, Mrs Peace Okafor and Mr Alphonsus  Egwim, described the training programme as a blessing to the poor people in the society.

According to them, if the government would support them with funds to kick-start their businesses, the development would go a long way to eradicate poverty in the society.” We have the skills now but we would need government support,” they said.

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