| By Chibuzo Ihegboro |
If you want a good discourse on how to start up life without necessarily relying on the white-collar job, then Ikenna Chukwujekwu is the person to talk to.
In a country where getting a good paying job is down to privilege and luck, he has taken a road less travelled. By shunning the usual course of getting an office job and settling instead for self-employment, he has created a world of opportunities for a multitude of unemployed youths.
What the CEO of Edxtra Associates Ltd. and founder of AfterSchoolAfrica did was to create a platform that brings information on scholarships available online to prospective scholars. And over a decade, he has helped many to achieve their scholarship dreams across Africa and beyond. In this interview, the Anambra State-born revealed his humble beginning, the mileage covered so far and the goals ahead. What is your business all about?
Edxtra Associates Ltd. is a content development and digital marketing company that founded AfterSchoolAfrica.com, an online platform for Africans to search for scholarships and other funding opportunities. AfterSchoolAfrica is to people looking for educational and entrepreneurial opportunity what a job website is to job seekers. It came into existence in 2009. Since then, uncountable students and entrepreneurs have secured scholarships to study locally and abroad. The platform has brought to people’s awareness various funding competitions. We also provide digital marketing services for businesses.
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How did you set up your business?
After my internship in 2005, I resolved that I would never end up an employee. While waiting for the call up for the National Youth Service, I got involved in different ventures. I worked as a props and set manager for a Nollywood movie producer. I began selling Nollywood movies at Trade Fair Complex, Lagos. Later I dabbled into buying and selling of jewellery, going from office to office in Lagos until I went for the national service in Bayelsa State. After the service year, my plan was to work for a few years and then start my own business. All my efforts to get a job proved unfruitful in the first year. I decided to stop wasting my time looking for a job and start something on my own.
Things got tougher. I worked as a construction site supervisor with my brother without getting paid. While at it, I started the website, which later became AfterSchoolAfrica.com. I did other side businesses within this time, but my passion for helping young people to learn got me to abandon everything else to focus on building this online platform.
What is the training you had before starting up?
I learnt everything over the Internet. A huge amount of information and knowledge abound on the Internet, which anyone can take advantage of. I have a Bachelor’s degree in Petroleum Engineering, but most of what I do to earn a living today, I learnt them over the Internet and from reading books. I love to read. Since starting, I’ve taken a handful of business and entrepreneurship courses as well.
How has it been running your company all these years?
Quite revealing. I was resolute to build something of my own. So, I had no other option but to make this work. With every challenge I encountered, I had to figure out how to solve it. I’ve had to make a lot of decisions, like moving from a sole proprietor, working from home to building a company with a team and an office space. This is a transition I believe every business owner will have to make at some point. The journey for me has been one of growth and learning.
How do you handle the competition?
I don’t think of how to cope with competitors, rather I am focused on how to deliver better service to our target audience. One of the reasons I started AfterSchoolAfrica was because I noticed the existence of a lot of scholarship opportunities for African students online. There were websites that provided this information for students across the world. But there was rarely any website that was focused on the African audience at that time. I believe I could have benefited from one of these programmes if I had been aware of it during my year of studies. So, I decided to create a platform that would focus on informing the African audience on the available opportunities out there.
Since then, we keep looking for ways to make it easier for more people to know and take advantage of these opportunities. One of those ways was the creation of a mobile app, which is available on Google Playstore. We also published The Scholarship Digest that contains interviews of 15 past multi-scholarship award winners and a compilation of over 1,400 funding opportunities for Africans. On our Youtube channel, we also publish video tutorials on how to leverage these opportunities. We have also invited applications for our pilot programme, Young African Explorers Programme (YAEP). It is a platform where we bring young people together, train them on how to make informed career decisions and how to apply for education funding. After training, we assign to each participant a mentor that will guide them in making their career decisions and follow through their applications. This hands-on, practical approach we bring into everything we do sets us apart from everyone else.
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Where do you see your company in the next five years?
What AfterSchoolAfrica is doing is democratising access to opportunities for quality education. In the next five years, we will be the Number One destination, connecting Africans across the world to diverse local and global opportunities.
At what point did you give up on white collar job?
I never wanted a white-collar job. Even when I was job hunting, I wasn’t as serious about it. There was this job I applied for where I was the second best candidate for the written interview. I could say I performed well. But I didn’t get the job. Then there was another job interview I attended. I was called and congratulated for getting the job, and told to expect an appointment letter. I never heard from them. When I inquired, I was told someone related to a top person had taken the position. Precisely, it was in December 2009 that I picked up my CV, tossed it into a drawer and said I was never going to apply for a job again. That was the end of my job search.
What is your plan concerning your university certificate or the course you studied?
None at all.
What gives you joy as an entrepreneur?
The freedom I enjoy. I don’t take this for granted. Though, I show up to work every day, simply because I want to.
What was the negative experience of the early years of your starting your business?
When my parents were retiring to the East in 2010, I couldn’t afford to stay back in Lagos. I had to move to the village with them. I had to walk a long distance to get to the cyber café. I constantly had to deal with people, including friends and family members, who questioned what I was doing.
I wrote my first book with a Nokia 3230 phone because I didn’t have a laptop. I bought my first laptop with the first money I made from my website. Afterwards, I put my earning on hold so that it would stack up into something that could afford me to move back to Lagos. When I finally requested the payment from Google, it turned out that some unknown persons had hijacked my account and cleared the cheque. I had to start saving all over again. There were lots of discouraging times. But in all, I always believed that “this too will pass.”
What is your advice to the multitude of applicants waiting for white collar jobs?
Being unemployed is a choice. That is my belief. You are unemployed when you don’t have anything doing, right? If we are talking about underemployment, then that’s a different topic.
A friend of mine, who works with one of the most successful digital marketing agencies in Nigeria, simply approached them and offered to work for free for six months. He has been with them for close to two years and now earn a salary. The last time we spoke, he was planning on starting his own agency. Imagine if he was still waiting to get the perfect job.
To that person waiting for the white collar job, I’d say: Get your hands working on something, anything that affords you the opportunity to keep learning and growing, even if you are not paid at first. There are lots of information technology skills you can learn. Not everyone will own a business, I agree; but everyone must find something to do.
What is your background?
I am the seventh child in a family of eight children. Both my parents were traders. We attended primary school thanks to free education in Lagos State. I was the only one in the family that attended a boarding school. We grew up lacking money to afford most of the things we needed, but never lacking in hope and dreams. So we were never poor.
As a student, I was one of those pupils some students would want to sit close to during the exam. Everyone in my family thought I was going to become a medical doctor. I chose to study Petroleum Engineering because I wanted a profession that will help towards making my dream of financial independence by age 26 a reality. I am married and blessed with children.
