Tag: international entrepreneurship education

Two Worlds. One Conviction. How BizWorld’s first African partnership is bringing entrepreneurship education to Nigerian youth – and why it matters. Every year, millions of young people across Africa finish school and face the same question. Now what? In Nigeria alone, the formal job market cannot absorb the number of graduates entering it each year. The math doesn’t work. And yet the system keeps telling young people that a degree leads to a job, and a job leads to a life. Most of them are walking toward a door that may not open. BizWorld has spent more than 25 years building a different answer. Not a workaround. A foundation. The conviction that entrepreneurship skills – how to identify a problem, build a solution, manage money, lead a team, and persist through failure – are not extras. They are the thing. Teach them early enough, and you change what a young person believes is possible for their life. That conviction has been tested across cultures and continents. In the UAE, the UK, Japan, and China, BizWorld’s international partners have run YES! cohorts that accelerated youth-led businesses – some of which have gone on to generate real revenue and create jobs in their own communities. Since 1997, BizWorld has reached more than 870,000 young people worldwide. The model works. It travels. Now, for the first time, it has arrived on the African continent. BizWorld is proud to announce its first-ever African partnership – welcoming MYLI Africa as BizWorld Nigeria. A milestone 25 years in the making. The Problem He Saw From the Inside Efosa Idemudia, CEO of MYLI Africa, didn’t set out to build an education platform. He set out to solve a problem he couldn’t ignore. While working to bring entrepreneurship programs into Nigerian secondary schools, Efosa walked into a school and discovered something that stopped him cold. The school had been operating without a principal for six months. Inside, he found teachers earning the equivalent of $50 a month – so underpaid that their teaching had become a side hustle, while their side businesses had become their main focus. Classrooms were built around passing exams, not building understanding. Parents, stretched too thin, weren’t showing up. He didn’t write a report. He took the principal’s office. From that vantage point, Efosa saw what Nigerian education actually needed – not more criticism, but a better structure. What emerged was MYLI Africa and its platform Ọ́málearn: a vetted, accountable system connecting qualified educators with students and families. Built on a simple belief. Teachers deserve to be treated as professionals. And learning should produce measurable outcomes, not just exam results. When MYLI Africa discovered BizWorld, something clicked. As Efosa puts it, having BizWorld’s backing changes the conversation entirely. Entrepreneurship education in Nigeria can be met with skepticism – seen as informal, unstructured, a fallback for those without better options. But when parents and schools see that MYLI Africa is part of a global network backed by some of the world’s leading entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, the conversation changes. It stops being a pitch. It starts being a partnership. That shift is exactly what BizWorld was built to create. This partnership is just beginning. Right now, MYLI Africa is training its founding cohort of verified teacherpreneurs – educators being equipped with BizWorld’s curriculum, tools, and global network to deliver entrepreneurship education to Nigerian students for the very first time. What comes next – the classrooms, the cohorts, the young people who will see a different future because of what they learn – depends on the continued generosity of people who believe in this work. You’ve helped BizWorld reach more than 870,000 young people across the globe. Nigeria is next.