Ezenwa Okoro: We Neglect Our Vibrant Youths at Our Own Peril

Interview

Rita Ezenwa-Okoro is a pacesetter in the Creative Industry. She is the Principal Communications Consultant and Chief Creative Officer of ROC, a strategic communications company that provides cutting edge solutions for businesses to become the go-to brand in their industries. ROC recently launched the first of its kind e-commerce advertising boutique agency that services businesses on a global level. Rita is also the Founder and Lead Visionary of Street Project Foundation, an organisation that uses Creative arts as a tool to facilitate opportunities for Youth Employment, Social Mobilization and Cross-Cultural Dialogue.

In collaboration with Women in Advertising, she convenes the programme called Digital Amazons, which aims at balancing the gender scale in the creative sector of the industry through capacity building and internship placements. Street Project Foundation recently won the Intercultural and Innovation Award organised by United Nations Alliance of Civilization and BMW Group in Dubai. In this interview with THISDAY, Rita talks about the Award, how her Street Project Foundation has been impacting the lives of Nigerian youths and women using creative arts to develop their talents in many areas. Excerpts:

Let’s start with the honour bestowed upon you and your organisation recently. When you received the news about your nomination, how did you feel and what do you think were considered before the award was given to you?

It was part of a long process. We had to apply for the award, for one, and we had to be shortlisted for the Award. We also had to do some due diligence in terms of the programme and how well we’ve run it, our financial capacity just to show that we are an organisation that can be trusted and is transparent and an organisation that’s got integrity. We had to prove that. It was followed by an interview coordinated by the United Nations Alliance for Civilisation and Accenture and of course, BMW Group. All of them were presented and we were interviewed. I think it was two weeks later or a month later that we then received an email saying that we had been selected as one of the top ten across the world for the Award. Obviously, we were very excited.

What about your Street Project Foundation? How did it start? What are you trying to achieve with your Youth Booth Camp launched in 2016?

Street Project Foundation started as far back as 2008. It was shortly after I finished my youth service and I was part of a community development service group called One House Music Unit and what we did was we took music to the streets, we used music as a tool for social transformation. I was Vice President of that group of young people. We were all over Nigeria, as you’ll expect, it was the National Youth Service Corps. After the one year of creating music, recording music and presenting it under Ojuelegba Bridge, under Ikeja Bridge, in schools and in churches, we were taking music that spoke about the unity of Nigeria, that talked about ending ethnic and religious intolerance, music that spoke about peace and just doing that work for one year triggered something that was in the inside of me and I think it was proper.

So, after my youth service year, I reflected on what I wanted to do and it definitely was to continue that work. How I wanted to do it, I didn’t know at the time. And it evolved and so in 2008, there was more clear direction on how I wanted to proceed with this work, even though I also was pursuing a career in advertising, having studied Creative Arts at the University of Lagos. And so I tinkered with it a bit and we and started the programme called Street Play, which eventually evolved into Street Project Foundation. The whole essence is to use Creative Arts to facilitate youth development, cross-cultural dialogue and social mobilisation. It would be a longer story if I told the entire story. The long and short of it is what that street project is about. Also what stirred me up to do this has to with my background. I’m the last born of six children.

I think I’m the only one in my family who studied a course that is in alignment with my natural gift. You’ll notice that this is a challenge world over, especially in a country like Nigeria, where for many years having a white collar job was more prestigious than being a creative or being one in the orange economy. And so a lot of young people are unemployed because they are wasting a lot of their time focusing on areas that are not their natural inclination and so there is a quote that we use in our organisation, ‘we believe we can make a sustainable living doing what we love’.

So, start first with identifying what you love and by doing that, you can then hone the skill because now what doesn’t feel like work, it doesn’t feel like a job, because it’s something you love to do and when you’re able to hone your passion, and hone your skills, it’s easier to thrive and that way we can curb unemployment and we can develop the skill set of young people. Another reason why Street Project Foundation exists is that we believe in the power of play and performance to be used as a tool to develop soft skills such as communication, critical thinking, skill building and also building one’s confidence and also managing young people’s mental health. It would amaze you how much the Performing Arts or the Creative Arts allow young people to express themselves and express their emotions and in that process they experience feelings and development that allow them to thrive in life. That’s it in a nutshell.

There seems to be a new industry now in Nigeria, carved out of the creative industry which many young people are embracing and that is skit making. How involved are you in that as part of your intervention to develop young talents?

Yes. In general, we call it content development. A lot of our programmes are aligned to that, they encourage young people to create content. So, the Creative Youth Boot Camp, which we received the Award for, allows for that as well. So, our young people create stage plays, short films, and radio dramas and even paintings; they exhibit their work as well. The beautiful thing about the Creative Youth Boot camp is that we expose the young people to different genres of the Arts. So, even if you came in auditioned as a musician we let you explore what it feels like to be visual artist and we’ve found out that it has proved to be valuable because our young people then discover new talents in that regard.

And then the current project we are running in support with Voice Nigeria and that we are doing in collaboration with Enugu Youth Entrepreneurship Network is called Artvocacy, where we are teaching our young people how to use Arts to advocate for social justice issues they care about. And in that process, they create a short film, they create podcast series, they create a coffee table book and they create online skits that will be used to build and grow the movement on social media. By and large, it’s a lot of work we do with our young people is content development.

From your organisation’s profile, you have done interventions in Lagos and Abuja. Are there plans to spread it to other states of the Federation?

We have footprints in Lagos, Abuja and Enugu. We’re going to Enugu come January to run our Artvocacy further. That’s where we are in the country, but our goal is to be widespread, nationwide, to be a national NGO that focuses on youth development, youth development using Creative Arts as a tool.

You have also been involved in championing efforts aimed at placing women in a position using digital programme. Can you dwell more on this?

For many years I work as a copywriter and concept developer. And so, I’m a creative through and through. For the many years I worked in Advertising, I was often the only female in the Creative Department. It was a challenge seeing females rise to the position of Creative Director. I faced that challenge as well. And then coming out of mainstream advertising, even though I still consult, it was a problem that myself and my kids needed to address. Being an organisation that uses Creative Arts for youth development, it just makes sense to develop a programme that addresses this.

So, we went into partnership, we collaborated with the Association of Advertising Practitioners of Nigeria’s Committee of Women in Advertising to commence the programme called Digital Amazons. It is more or less like a crash programme for female creative in Digital Marketing, Graphics Design, Photography, videography, storytelling, and project management enterprise development. Exposing them to these things and more or less turning their analogue creative skills to Digital Creative Skills, and by so doing creating space for women in the Creative Industry by developing their capacity. And why this particular programme is so intriguing is because the moment we are done with the training with these young women, we match them up with mentors and place them on internship in the Advertising, Media and Digital industries.

I’m glad to say that because of how well our pilots came in 2019, we got a support from World Connect in the United States to run another Digital Amazon programme early this year. And now we have got funding from the United States Development for Africa, that is USADF and LSETF, that’s Lagos State Employment Trust Fund to train 200 young women in 2022. And that’s taking women out of the labour market and getting them gainfully employed by giving them 21st Century skills.

There’s no doubt that COVID-19 has affected virtually every business across the world. How has this affected your organisation?

You know when crisis comes, it either breaks you or it strengthens you. Yes, COVID-19 came with a lot of bad sides, but it strengthened our capacity even more. We had always wanted a hybrid format of working in terms of the way our organisation is structured, because we have staff in Lagos, Abuja, and Enugu. And so what strings all of us together is really being online, constantly online, working online and then when we have to run the camps, we need to be physically present. And so that helped a great deal because it meant that we even have to strengthen our capacity even more in terms of how then can we also run our boot camps online.

I’ll give you an instance. In 2020, we were in the middle of the second cohort of the Creative Youth Camp Art for Social transformation when the COVID-19 struck us in Nigeria and we also had to lock down and shut down everywhere. This was week two; immediately we had to start thinking about how we were going to run this boot camp virtually and at the time, our young people were limited because we work with young people who are from low income background. Not everyone of them had the kind of fund that allow them get on zoom consistently

So I was saying that there is a development phrase that says ‘nothing about us without us.’ So, when the COVID-19 issue struck us, we had to speak to our young people also working with us to come up with a plan on what we could do with them virtually, this led us to revolutionalizing.

So on WhatsApp we were able to galvanize the young people, from March to about August 1st when they then got their graduation. So, it took them a longer time to graduate but we engaged them using the WhatsApp platform; I think created content for our YouTube channel. You know when you’re talking about skits, we were able to put that together and edit it remotely and they were creating things like that. They also created a programme called Word for Word, which is a programme that has to do with teaching people sign language. This is for persons with disabilities because a lot of our programmes, we teach inclusion, which means that we must always have persons with disabilities represented in our programmes, and during that set we had persons who were hearing-impaired.

So, it was an opportunity to teach young people sign language and we had thirteen episodes created through interaction on WhatsApp and very limited interactions through zoom. And then we had another sensitization done telling people about covid-19, educating people about COVID-19, what they needed to do at that time, which we ran on radio. So, we had our young people creating a jingle and an advertorial to tell people about safe practices during Covid-19. So, that’s how we were able to weather the storm during the peak of the Covid lockdown.

So, I would say against all odds our young people still thrived during that period because we were creating, we were engaging them even though we were all locked down in our homes. So, like I said crisis could either break you or make you stronger, and for us, it made us stronger so that when we then came back to in-person training, we saw the need to expand our curriculum to having mobile phone story telling. So, in subsequent creative classes, we started teaching our young people how to create short films using their mobile phones. And so we actually had a short film that has been aired on Pop Central, and has also been nominated for an award that was done using their camera. It’s called ‘Keeping it 100’. You’ll find it on our website. It’s the first video you’ll see there. So, our young people were creating against all odds because we didn’t allow the circumstance to weigh us down. Instead, we were innovative and I believe that was one of the reasons we won the Intercultural Innovation Award because of our tenacity as an organization.

What are your plans for 2022?

There is a lot going on in 2022, like I mentioned, for the whole year next year, we are going to be running the Amazon’s Programme and building the capacity of 200 female creatives. We are also going to be running another Creative Youth Boot camp in the second quarter of next year in support of the United Nations Alliance of Civilization and the BMW Group. The award will come with a 20,000 dollar grant which will enable us replicate the Creative Youth Boot Camp again. They will be creating a short film and other certain episodes and radio drama that will talk about social issues that young people care about, speaking against xenophobia, speaking against Gender Based Violence, speaking against and educating people about social issues and what they need to do.

We are still running our Artvocacy programme, which uses Arts to advocate on social issues that young people care about. We say speak up and not shut up about the social injustice in our country. So, they’ll be using their various Arts. We don’t see it as a problem, we see it as a movement. Just a few days ago, that was Sunday, December 12, we activated the Artvocacy Movement in Abuja and next year we are activating the Movement in Enugu. As I said, the vision is to spread this movement across Nigeria and that way our young people will be able to direct their energy in a positive way because we know that right now protesting on the streets is unsafe because of how closed up our country is becoming when they see our young people being very vocal about the real issues that are affecting us as a society. So, Artvocacy creates an alternative way to advocate for these issues. You see our plate is full in 2022.

What better way do you think the government can help the creative industry and by extension, the youths?

One practical way and I’m an advocate for this, of getting our young people engaged, is by creating the infrastructure and sustaining the infrastructure where young people can thrive. This is a big issue in development. One of the major areas where our cost is higher is finding space, adequate space where we can run our programmes. In Lagos alone I know there are over twenty youth centres, but out of the 20 youth centres, maybe one and a half is actually functioning. Others are dilapidated, some have been turned to places of worship and it doesn’t augur well. In developed countries, there are resource centres for youths. And they don’t joke with it. There’s resources centres, sports centres, creative centres, where young people go on a daily basis. After-school programmes exist. We don’t have these things. I’ve spoken about Lagos, we have no idea of how many youth centres are even available across Nigeria that are functioning or if they are in existence at all. In Abuja I know there are centres that have been built but nothing is happening there.

So, it’s either they have the infrastructure and they don’t have the people who know how to run these centres properly. So, one practical step is getting infrastructure in place for youth development. An organisation like ours will be able to run this infrastructure across the nation because we have a blueprint on how to run programmes. And having infrastructure in place will create employment for a lot of young people as well because people have to man those things. But they will also need to have the capacity to be able to run these places in such a way that truly the community should be able to see what young people are doing and see young people thrive. If we do not invest in our youths, there will be problem for this country. And one way is to focus on that infrastructure. And it’s beyond your typical institutions like schools and all of that. Much as it is important, not everyone can get into higher institution.