Abisoye Ajayi-Akinfolarin

Abisoye is creating diverse education opportunities for girls and women at the lowest levels of the economic ladder in Nigeria. She is empowering young girls to access basic education in urban slum communities and upskilling the women in various vocations to enable them to break the cycle of illiteracy and take charge of their future.

Abisoye is creating architecture for change in underserved communities. Through process reform, her organization Pearls Africa is holding local and state governments accountable for bringing educational infrastructure to slum areas. She is creating a transformational education system targeted at young girls between the ages of 10 and 20 in communities where, as a result of poverty, girls’ access to basic education is severely limited.

Pearls Africa provides opportunities for young girls and women at the lowest levels in underserved communities in Nigeria to have access to education and digital literacy skills. Abisoye does this through a blended model that gives them basic education, links them to job opportunities, and enables them to acquire functional digital skills; by so doing, she positions them to replicate the approach in their own communities.

Abisoye believes that with the right support, nothing should prevent a young girl from an underserved community from acquiring an education, accessing opportunities, and mastering digital literacy skills that would allow them to be highly mobile in society, and be economically independent. With this in mind, Pearls Africa screens the young girls carefully to determine their level of motivation before placing them in their program. Abisoye ensures that these girls have both the empathy and aptitude to return to their communities to replicate and support other girls in those communities. In this way, she is building a community of change makers who are replicating the framework across Nigeria and beyond.

Abisoye recognizes that for Pearls Africa to achieve a sustained impact in their work with the young girls in these communities, securing parental support and buy-in, especially of the mothers is equally as important as her work with the young girls themselves, largely due to the peculiarities of the communities. With that in mind, through her mothers’ support network, she also offers training to the mothers of the young girls, because having the young girls return to their illiterate mothers without any form of intervention for the mothers would simply defeat the entire investment made in the girls. The mothers’ support network is a women welfare group where they share ideas, discuss challenges, and seek solutions to common issues. Abisoye also partners with Mamamoni, an organization that provides training, support, and micro-loans to low-income women in underserved communities to provide skill-based training, and psychosocial support to the mothers.

To date, Abisoye’s approach has reached over 5,000 girls in Lagos state and has been replicated in five states in Nigeria. Through her ambassadors’ program, her idea has reached young girls and women in underserved communities in 16 African countries.

Women and young girls in Nigeria, particularly those in underserved communities, are born into a patriarchal system where they face socio-economic injustice, deprivation, and lack of access to opportunities. According to a Statista report on literacy rates in Nigeria, female literacy in underserved and rural communities is at a paltry 35.4% compared to that of urban females at 74%. Because of how low the numbers are, it readily creates a condition in which mothers are not sufficiently informed to provide optimal educational and career guidance for their daughters. Girls in these communities naturally follow in their illiterate mothers’ footsteps until an external force intervenes to break them out of that cycle. Unfortunately, this cocktail of endemic disadvantages eventually translates to economic inequality at the grassroots. The girls are inadvertently trapped in the poverty cycle like their parents. A 2021 UNESCO Institute for Statistics data on out-of-school primary school-age children in Nigeria shows that 58% (4.97 million) of the out-of-school children are female. The effects of the Covid-19 pandemic have further exacerbated the situation, which has resulted in increased teenage pregnancies, effectively putting a stop to their educational journey.

Furthermore, these underserved communities are more or less invisible to the government as the latter largely ignores them. The fallout of this systemic neglect is a long-standing lack of basic education and literacy, access to basic amenities and the like, which has grown over the years to endemic proportions. In cases where some semblance of basic education appears to exist, its quality leaves much to be desired, and the schools mostly do not have enough manpower to cover the number of learners and are therefore inadequate to provide the bridge to a better life for the young people in those communities. All of these predispose young people to constantly seeking out opportunities in areas and sectors that hold the potential and promise of a better future—a future that education and digital skills could readily provide.

It is also important to highlight that the perennial lack of infrastructure, teachers, and basic learning tools has hampered the development of learning options for young people in these underserved communities. All this paints a rather bleak picture for the future of young people born in these communities, and sadly, young girls are left with the short end of the stick, having to live through the same cycle of poverty and deprivation their mothers faced.

Pearls Africa’s work takes a holistic approach that aims to empower young girls, giving them the tools to exit poverty and deprivation in their communities. Abisoye uses a specially designed transformational skill development training program that involves psychosocial support, basic education, and empowerment for not only the girls in the communities but also their mothers. Her training offers these young girls a simplified blended model designed to disabuse their minds of the fact that they have to wait for the government – that has more or less abandoned them – to create opportunities for them.

Abisoye and her team at Pearls Africa do not enter the communities posturing that they have all the answers. Instead, as a process reformer, she holds local governments and local leaders accountable for bringing basic education resources to the areas they ought to serve. Through stakeholder management, she recruits potential changemakers using Pearls Africa selection criteria that help them determine their level of interest, inherent abilities, and determination to bring change. She equally engages supporters, like the girls’ mothers, partner organizations, and the local government authorities, to first ensure that state government-sponsored basic education is brought into the communities.

Once Pearls Africa has guaranteed the girls’ enrollment in the national education system, they invite them to join the afterschool GC Mentors program in batches of 50 participants. Through this program, the girls become empowered when they learn decision-making skills, personal hygiene, sex education, how to handle cases of sexual harassment at school, and other essential capabilities. As a result, the girls acquire heightened self-esteem, which allows them, for example, to make better career choices and strive for higher academic excellence.

All these skills also help them to better navigate their social lives in their communities. Through the Empowered Hands strategy, Pearls Africa trains the girls in vocational skills like bead making, fashion design, Ankara craft, Aso-Oke weaving, hair styling, baking, and wig-making. With the skills gained through training, the girls are activated to provide the same level of support to others within their communities. The model's uniqueness is that rather than focusing on expanding the model herself, Abisoye coaches, activates, and supports the growing network of young girls who become changemakers for their communities and other communities around them. The newly activated changemakers sign up for the different aspects of the training they want to replicate in their community. Pearls Africa assigns coaches who visit the girls periodically to evaluate their progress, offer advice and support. During the summer holidays, Pearls Africa organizes paid virtual activities that resemble those done in person. The funds are then invested to finance the work with underserved communities. This frees up resources for Pearls Africa to use in their changemaking work with the young girls in underserved communities.

True to Abisoye’s commitment to deepen the level of engagement for the girls and their mothers, Pearls Africa partners with Mamamoni, a social enterprise that offers empowerment skills training and micro-loans to rural women. The training is skills-based, with an infusion of psychosocial support. Through this partnership, they have trained the women on making hand sanitizers, face masks, and disinfecting liquid soap for handwashing, all of which the women sell to sustain themselves and their families. By involving the girls’ mothers in the process and catering to them, Pearls Africa effectively makes the mothers the key guarantors of their daughters’ full participation in the program. This makes it easier for the mothers to see the need for their daughters’ continued involvement in the program.

To date, 40-50% of girls reached have finished the program and are now replicating Pearls Africa approach in their communities. This replicable model accounts for the widespread scaling of her idea to new states in Nigeria. Pearls Africa created an ambassador's program which partners with organizations in the following 16 African countries: Cameroon, Senegal, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Lesotho, South Sudan, Ghana, South Africa, The Gambia, Kenya, Liberia, Uganda, Botswana, and Namibia. After being trained and inspired by Abisoye, these ambassadors act as advocates and replicators of her approach in underserved communities within their respective countries. She is currently leveraging the success of her approach at the community and district levels to persuade the government at the state and federal levels in Nigeria to include her blended model as part of the curriculum of secondary schools.

Some of the communities in Nigeria Abisoye has reached with her approach include Makoko, Bariga, Iwaya, Liverpool Snake Island, Agege (Lagos state), Communities in Jos (Plateau state) and Ibadan (Oyo state), Ekiti state, Ogun state and the IDP camps in Borno State.

In Ghana, Abisoye partnered with the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA), who saw the potential of her idea to address the unequal access to opportunities in education and professional training that leads to extreme poverty. Thanks to this partnership, she has been able to replicate her model in underserved communities by working with UNFPA’s Youth Leaders (YoLe) Fellows community.

Abisoye lost her mother at the age of three, and as a result she had to grow up with a survival mindset, ready to defy all odds. When she was 15, she left home to escape from continuous verbal abuse and neglect by her stepmother and biological father. After graduating from high school, her chances of attending university were slim, owing to financial reasons. After some time of waiting, she enrolled in the National Institute of Information Technology (NIIT), where she acquired tech skills that would eventually form the bedrock of her changemaking work. While there, she developed self-taught skills that helped her gain more ground faster than her contemporaries.

Abisoye believes strongly in the importance of girls and women being not only consumers of technology solutions and products but also its creators. Based on that understanding, she started her work in underserved, densely populated communities in Lagos. By providing digital literacy solutions to young girls within those communities she gave them a fighting chance, helping them generate value for themselves, and ultimately escape the poverty in their communities.

Her sustainability strategy is unique in the sense that she is also building a community of changemakers by empowering them to solve problems in their communities and commit to mentoring others and replicating the approach in other underserved communities around them.

Her determination and grit over the years have earned her international awards in 2018 like the CNN Heroes honoree and ONE’s Women of the Year both, as well as featuring in the BBC’s 100 Women list.