‘In education, we’re taught to READ, not to think’

Oluwabusola Majekodunmi is an economist, education enthusiast, and also one of the 2016 Mandela Washington Fellows. In this interview, she spoke about how she is helping to bridge the gap between conventional education and skills acquisition.

with ‘Steer to greatness’?

I want to use it as a channel to help young people especially teenagers’ access quality, innovative and relevant education, in the hope that after leaving secondary school, they already see themselves as entrepreneurs and leaders, they understand that leadership is service and not how to get but how to give.

How many persons have you trained so far?

Since we started in June last year, with two workshops and one boot camp, we have trained around 100 teenagers but then I have been invited to other events and that has expanded the reach, to about 500.

What is your empowering others? target on

A relevant quality innovative education; we want to help teenagers be able to express themselves and be the best they can be in leadership. The focus in our education is to read and write, and then we forget the thinking part. Imagination breeds creativity because it is with imagination that you start creating. We need to get people to think, that is what differentiates developed underdeveloped countries. with

What do you do at Shuttler’s?

I started Shutters in November 2015, with my friend Damilola Olokesoshe. She reached out to me with the idea on how to help commuters held in traffic, and we started researching and then started in November and thankfully in the one year plus we have actually scaled a number of hurdles. We are not where we want to be yet. We stopped at some point last year and launched in October. We have been running consistently and have shuttled over 1,200 users.

What are your challenges at Shuttlers?

Now that we have been able to build an image for Shuttlers we are stuck on capacity and that is why we are keying into channels to partner with bus manufacturing groups like Innoson group. Another thing in starting a business is managing employees; getting the employees to buy into our orientation, and then those that have this don’t want to work for a start-up.