A physician with long experience in hospital governance joins our board, and a new partnership in Nigeria begins a 12-week pilot.
Two things happened at Africa 2100 in the past week. One concerns the people helping us steward the organization. The other concerns 19 young people starting their own entrepreneurial journey. Together, they say something about where Africa 2100 is headed.
Welcoming Dr. Olalekan Sowade
Dr. Olalekan Sowade has joined the Africa 2100 Board of Directors.
Dr. Sowade is a board-certified internist who trained at the College of Medicine, University of Ibadan, before completing graduate study in London, and brings more than two decades of clinical leadership and hospital governance experience. Since 2014 he has served as Vice Chairman of the Board of Trustees at St Bernard Hospital, where he was also Chief of Medical Staff from 2014 to 2025. He currently chairs the hospital board’s finance subcommittee and serves on its quality review subcommittee. Earlier in his career, he served as principal investigator on a clinical trial in vascular medicine and published research on venous disorders.
Why his experience matters to us has less to do with the length of his résumé than with what Africa 2100 needs now. We run several pilots at once, with different partners, across Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya. That brings more budgets to scrutinize, more outcomes to verify, and more decisions to make about what to continue and what to stop. Chairing a hospital board’s finance subcommittee and serving on its quality review subcommittee give Dr. Sowade a working familiarity with the less visible disciplines of institutional governance: reading the numbers closely, asking whether results are actually being measured, and holding leadership accountable for both.
The board and staff are glad to have him, and we look forward to his guidance in the years ahead.
Nineteen Young Nigerians Begin Something New
On September 25, Africa 2100 and Jacaranda Care Foundation launched a 12-week Youth Entrepreneurship Readiness Pilot in Nigeria, opening with a co-facilitated onboarding session for an inaugural cohort of 19 participants. The two organizations formalized the partnership through a Memorandum of Understanding that took effect September 2.
Participants aren’t expected to arrive with polished business plans, or even fully formed ideas. They are being asked to start where they are, find a problem worth solving, and test what they think they know about it by talking to real people.
Jacaranda Care Foundation is a registered non-profit based in Enugu whose work focuses on widows, vulnerable women, and their children, through education and sustainable programs. Jacaranda recruited the 19 participants, all of them 18 or older. They know their community in a way we could not from a distance.
That is the model behind this pilot. Local organizations bring trust, relationships, context, and day-to-day accountability. Africa 2100 brings a structured entrepreneurship-readiness pathway, delivered through the Arise mobile app. Neither organization has to pretend it can do the other’s job. Our Tech Venture Builder pilot with LM Tech Hub and our pilot with Church Life Africa follow the same approach: Africa 2100 doesn’t need to know every community, as long as it works alongside organizations that do.
In practice, Jacaranda handles participant engagement and accountability support, and hosts the orientation, checkpoint, and showcase sessions. Each participant is also paired with an accountability buddy for the full 12 weeks.
Chudi described the thinking behind the partnership this way:
“Talent is everywhere across Africa, but a clear, supported path to enterprise is not. Jacaranda Care Foundation knows its young people and communities deeply, while Arise provides a structured pathway for turning ambition into action and testing ideas against real customer needs. Together, we want to learn whether entrepreneurship readiness can be built, measured, and scaled.” — Chudi K. Obiaya, Founder, Africa 2100
Fr. Anselm Okeke, Jacaranda’s founder, framed it in terms of the people his organization already serves:
“At Jacaranda, our work has always been about dignity and self-reliance. This pilot gives the young people we serve practical tools, a supportive community and the confidence to create opportunity for themselves and their families. We are proud to walk this journey with Africa 2100 and help create a pathway through which young people can build confidence, test their ideas, and pursue greater economic self-reliance.” — Fr. Anselm Okeke, Founder & Executive Director, Jacaranda Care Foundation
This Isn’t a Startup Accelerator
We are deliberately not calling this an accelerator. The goal isn’t to produce 19 startups in 12 weeks.
The goal is to help 19 young people get better at deciding whether a problem is worth pursuing, who actually experiences it, and what evidence they need before putting serious money or time into a solution. Twelve weeks is enough time to get sharper about those questions and to talk to real potential customers. It is not enough time to build a company, and we won’t pretend otherwise.
On Arise, participants work through three self-paced courses. The first covers entrepreneurial mindset and motivation. The second focuses on clarifying the problem they want to solve. The third covers foundational market validation: customer discovery, building customer personas, and mapping the customer journey.
How We’ll Know If It Worked
The operative word in Chudi’s quote is “learn.” This is an experiment, and we haven’t decided in advance that it will succeed.
The partners will track participant engagement, course completion, and changes in entrepreneurial confidence, using a baseline survey and an end-of-pilot survey. The pilot ends with a Final Showcase in December, where participants will present their venture concepts. Participants who complete the requirements will receive a co-branded Youth Entrepreneurship Readiness certificate. The more important outcome, though, is what each of them can show about their problem, their customer, and their next step.
After the showcase, Africa 2100 and Jacaranda will conduct a joint review that will inform a Pilot Impact Report with recommendations for a possible Phase II. Depending on what the report finds, that could mean more Jacaranda cohorts in more communities, continued venture development through Arise, and broader mentorship or youth ambassador opportunities.
We will report what we find, including the parts that don’t go to plan. A useful pilot isn’t necessarily one that produces the result we hoped for. It may be one that shows us clearly what has to change before we try it at a larger scale.
What These Two Developments Tell Us
As Africa 2100 grows, we have to pay closer attention to two things at once: how well we serve the people in our programs, and how carefully we run the organization that serves them.
Nineteen young people are now testing one part of our model in the field. Dr. Sowade joins a board that is responsible for making sure we learn from experiments like this one, run them responsibly, and are honest about what the evidence shows.
Welcome, Dr. Sowade. Welcome, Jacaranda Care Foundation. And welcome to the 19 participants who started on September 25.
We’ll be following this cohort over the next 12 weeks and sharing what we learn. If you have been through an entrepreneurship program yourself, or if you work with young founders, we’d like to hear from you: what made the difference between starting out with enthusiasm and actually staying engaged? Write to us at he***@********00.org.
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