Description of Smart Kids Business Club

We believe that the potential of the Nigerian’s young people is unlimited.

OUR MISSION
To help young people start and grow their own micro-enterprises in order to spark an entrepreneurial spirit in the next generation.
The concept of helping others to help themselves is far from new; it was exemplified in ancient times in the Chinese proverb “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish and he will eat for a life time."

There are three core principles in line with this philosophy that guide us in our work:

* Poverty Reduction- we intend to eradicate extreme poverty. Our programs focus first on young people from low-income families.

* Education – we exist to educate. Educational goals supersede any other aims our programs have.

* Entrepreneurship - we foster entrepreneurship.
Viewing enterprise as an effective means of economic prosperity, SKBC works to provide young people with the skills and inspiration they need to generate wealth for them and their families.

OUR VISION
To encourage a movement of successful next generation of entrepreneurs who use their creativity, business acumen and social conscience to drive a revival of positively focused business, and an extraordinary new era of individual expression and legacy.

OUR WORK
SKBC works to improve the relevancy, quality and availability of education in Nigeria. The innovative approach that we’ve developed is ‘Learn and Earn’ - teaching young people business and entrepreneurial skills, and generating much-needed income for them.

‘Learn and Earn’

What’s the big idea?

Learning for earning: A club that provides practical & business education that allows young people to lift themselves out of poverty.
Most young people in Nigeria end up working for themselves, but mostly they’re never taught how to succeed in business.

SKBC, however, equip young people for life-transforming the vulnerable and undervalued into self-confident graduates who are able to support themselves and their families.


HOW DOES IT WORK?
Many factors have contributed to the high unemployment rate while formal wage employment is shrinking very fast. We think that when self-employment increases, it offers more job opportunities for young people. Thus youth, as individuals, should endeavor to learn the basic skills involved in entrepreneurship to help them set up their own business or enterprises. An exposure to entrepreneurship skills will stimulate young people towards different opportunities beside wage employment. We hope they can transfer to their peers, the skills they will acquire in the entrepreneurship class.
Besides, the skills they will acquire should guide their everyday work and experiences in order to develop their entrepreneurial traits. This should motivate them so they can establish their own enterprise, subsequently create jobs for others, and improve upon their own quality of life and that of their families, through better job opportunities.

BACKGROUND

The problem: poverty
We live in an age where millions of people in developing countries have to survive on less than 2 dollars a day.

Poverty means that over 121 million children are out of education worldwide.

Only half of children in developing countries attend secondary school. In sub-Saharan Africa it’s only a quarter. Young people don’t go to schools because their families can’t afford paying fees. In the future they don’t have the skills to help themselves, so they become poor adults. And they can’t afford paying fees for their kids in schools.

The solution: Education
Education is a powerful tool for generating jobs, improving incomes, and expanding the opportunities available to young people in Nigeria. It’s simply the best way out of poverty!

The problem, however, is not only with lack of access to education for the poor. It is also the question of quality and relevance of education. For example, the majority of people living in extreme poverty rely on agriculture to make a living - and yet so few developing country education systems offer practical agricultural education at school level where it is taught, it’s often from an academic perspective, i.e., how plants grow, rather than from a livelihood perspective, i.e. how to make money from farming.

The challenge: Funding
If our government had sufficient funds to provide a first-rate education for all those who wanted it, poverty would be far rarer. The reality is that while government continues to struggle to fund basic education - as must be their priority - the vitally important area of vocational education remains significantly under-funded.
Confronting the immense challenges of global education today requires more than huge scale financial commitments - it requires solutions that are both scalable and financially sustainable.

*These questions demands practical answers:
Where girls’ education is seen as less valuable, how can we empower them to realize their full worth?

*If every school finishers in Nigeria decides to go job hunting after graduation, who then would create these jobs?

Our answer is Learn and Earn – an approach we have developed which is uniquely fitted to addressing these issues, it is an approach which is capable of benefiting millions.

Our commitment is to start kicking the revolution in education in Nigeria!
We believe that every child deserves a chance at a successful future, one where they have the ability to provide for themselves and have choices in life.
The only way we can successfully achieve this is by instilling entrepreneurial and life skills in them at young age, we do this through our programs and therefore teach them how to live life successfully before it is too late.

In Nigeria only three out of every ten school finishers will ever find employment, these statistics are alarming and proves that our fight to combat youth unemployment is definitely one that is worth-while.

Together we can build a future of motivated brilliant individuals who have a chance at life.

Students should learn more than just facts from a textbook! They also should be learning about real life!

Had a wonderful and an inspiring outing today.

I was at the GOVERNMENT COLLEGE AGEGE today, it was really interesting for to be instilling some good though provoking ideas into the minds these students.

This is just the beginning of something good.

Please join me let's change the world together.