Bookers International Schools

I grew up in the streets. I was homeless. An orphan. I never went to school and had to survive daily. Eating once a day was a luxury, and getting a roofed space to sleep at night was like winning the lottery. I witnessed violence, death and so much injustice and became used to it at a very young age.

Eventually, a street teacher called Mr. Bookers who dedicated his life to helping homeless children learn how to read and write taught me how to read. That changed my entire life and I had managed to escaped the streets. 

I had later attended a university part-time, I had gone to a polytechnic, I had earned diplomas in professional institutions, and I had discovered how education, skills and information can change the life of a once homeless young man to someone who is now a problem solver and change maker.

We offer education, agritech and sustainability training to low-income, out-of-school-children, and displaced youths in Nigeria. With a reach of over 5,000 youths yearly, full scholarships for formal education are offered to 50% selection of students from poor background, while those participating in the non-schooling program receive free training on managing farms, entrepreneurship, keeping livestock and building and maintaining waste conversion devices. Profit generated from these activities benefit both the school and the students.

We build partnership with our community to enrich lives through 7 programs; those benefiting include internally displaced and out-of-school children but specifically young women who are mostly discriminated against. The outcomes of our project include the following: literacy programs for unlettered children, skills provision, entrepreneurship education, and student managed farming and environmental projects; counselling for HIV and depressed young women, and provision of information regarding grants and funding for our young trained young entrepreneurs.

There is systemic discrimination in my country: quality education and empowerment programs are mainly for the elite, and this has created a cycle of challenges.

With 13.2 million out of school children and over 40 million unemployed young people which could grow up to 50 million by December 2020 in the era of Covid-19, Nigeria is a ticking time bomb.

There is growing insecurity, violence, hunger and multidimensional poverty—women and children remain the greatest victims.

The only hope for the youth is fleeing the country and there are thousands migrating yearly. The poorer-population who are the most desperate will take the "cheap route" like I did. The cheap route cuts through the Sahara Desert and Northern Africa countries. The final lap of this dangerous journey is finally facing the Mediterranean Sea to cross into Europe on inflatable boats. I unfortunately witnessed how hundreds of young African perished in their quest for economic Eldorado, and I have decided to return home--I wanted to do something.

In 2014, I co-founded Bookers International Schools to help young people, especially young women. I have since worked and tried to daily solve the: “Educational, mass migration, sensitization programs, skills and environmental challenges” in my community.

Bookers is a renowned provider of education to unprivileged and low income youths. We build partnership with our community to enrich lives through formal, vocational and entrepreneurship education. The outcomes include: skills provision, entrepreneurship education, counselling for HIV and depressed young women and provision of information regarding grants and funding.

We have different programs through which we empower young people which include the following:

1. 50:50 Educational Model: which means our entire formal education population are divided in 2 halves. Half pay, while the other are carefully selected young people from poor background.

2. ByFE: Bookers Youth Farm Enterprise, our agricultural program that provides intensive farming and livestock rearing skills to its participants.

3. BEEP: Bookers Eco-Education Program which collaborate with young people to address how youths can protect their environments and manage farm and educational waste.

4. And other programs to empower youths.

Bookers International School empowers unprivileged young people of different background, sex, cultural and language. Through our work on literacy to out-of-school-children, and a vocational high-school education which provide 22 skills, we are able to affect economic recovery, create young entrepreneurs, avert current and future vulnerabilities, and empower young women or marginalized strands of the communities.

Bookers’ seeks to solve the marginalization of poor, displaced and disabled young population with books, education, vocational and sensitization programs. We facilities access to free literacy programs, skills, and different empowering projects for 5,000 young people and yearly.

Our programs uncover that potential that build confidence and personal strength of our participants to overcome economical, emotional and deep rooted challenges within. We run different entrepreneurship programs which include a school farm, environmental education and projects and school backed small businesses and let our students, especially the young women run and train themselves, thereby creating tools for scalability and a means of developing young entrepreneurs, livelihood opportunities and community leadership.

Our solution has greatly reduced poverty, hunger, illiteracy and crime. In 2018, we started the HFI: Home Farm Initiative and encouraged over 3,000 youths to start a farm from the corner of their home. Today, over 500 of these farm projects have a combined value of over $100,000. The proud owners were youths who formerly depended on less than $1 daily.

With deep understanding of our communities, we understand the greatest challenges its young population faces and the required solution, and this is the form of education, sensitization and empowerment programs.

For someone who once lived on the street for nearly a decade, I have clear knowledge of the daily challenges of unprivileged young Nigerians, and especially young women who daily battle hunger, illiteracy, poverty, and violence. The root cause of these challenges is simply linked majorly to illiteracy, mentoring, awareness, and lack of skills.

My team and I believe therefore put “laddership”—which is helping young people to climb out these challenges before profit; knowing well we are elevating them to become part of the solutions and not just to remain as problems within their communities.

I had worked in different factories and a notable one was NICAPACO: Nigeria Cartons and Packing Company, a company owned by the Chinese. 

As I was promoted, I learned a lot about how the Chinese approached and solve problems. I discovered it was entirely different from the way Africans operated. The Chinese are very adaptable, modest, and extremely curious. A brief chat with some Chinese engineers changed my attitude. After I enrolled into part-time educational programs, I discovered the Nigerian learning education model is entirely different, and with less capacity building initiatives.

No wonder the Vanguard Newspaper in a 2018 front-page declared that the “Nigerian graduates are unemployable.” 

Besides, only 1 out of 4 high-school students ever even make it to the universities (qz.com), which means most Nigerian graduates and their high school counterparts face similar challenges: which is simply: “lack of problem skills.”

My co-founders and I there decided to solve these problems and we decide we will establish a foundation educational organization that will operate on 5 key metrics associated with empowerment of our target population:

1. Health and mental well-being 
2. Education and leadership program 
3. Gender equality 
4. Economic empowerment 
5. Environmental Education and programs

My past pain-point remains my greatest passion--and it still remain the challenge I am working on. I lived in the streets for over 10 years. I watched a homeless friend health deteriorate until she died. We had to live with her corpse for two days since nobody came to claim it. In the street, there was so much injustice and no hope.

Sadly, there are 100 times more homeless and out-of-school children who lived in the streets today than back in 1998. 

My co-founders, team and I have similar experience--we fully understand the challenges faced by unprivileged youths. One of the co-founders of Bookers was a young woman who had survived rape as a child and later went to the university so she could help other young women. The current supervisor of our school farms battled poverty for over 2 decades, so we all share similar background and experiences.

Our greatest passion and strength is knowing we are helping change the lives of some young children just like little Ayomide Olaoluwa whose 1st position winning story was read by thousands on the Financial Times about how our program saved him from the streets and how he found healing in books.

Long before I ever dreamed of owning a social enterprise, I had worked with a street teacher called Mr. Bookers. He was given that unique name due to his passion for books and teaching homeless children. He had a mini-street-school built with planks and cardboard where about 30 homeless children learned to read and write. I was one of his early students, and he is my role model even till date. I was often called his assistant.

Mr. Bookers was one of the three homeless people killed during retaliatory attacks caused by religious crisis raging in another part of the country. I automatically took the mantle and continued with his work. After the violence, I was determined to escape the street and so I had to work to earn a living and could only teach my fellow homeless mates during the weekends. I continued this work until 2007 even after I left the street.

I later continued the project in 2012 and called it "BCSI: Bookers Career and Skills Initiative. BCSI was created to tackle social challenges facing youths and skills gap. I formed a team and we worked by visiting public schools within Nigeria to educate youths about developing skills and what they needed to know about discovering their true passion. BCSI organized a lot of seminars and visited 6 states within Nigeria. It was functional till 2014 when it was renamed Bookers International Schools.

As a child, I noticed I was often sick. Growing up in the street complicated my health condition. I couldn't use the local health facilities since they are often overcrowded, and doctors don’t attend to a minor without their parent present. I lived through these pains, and would often tell myself I will be fine. By 24, I was going through major health challenges. I battled with high-blood pressure. My eyesight was getting blurring, I was often dizzy anytime I overworked, and discovered I might die very young. The government hospital cardiologist whom I later visited told me my condition was genetic and from extreme stress. He had urged me to relax. He had also recommended a private hospital for better treatment. The private hospital demanded for roughly $1,000 to treat me and I had fled the premise. 

Instead, I did extensive research, made radical changes, and today I am perfectly healthy. I have totally eliminated carbs from my dinner; I work-out daily, sleep 8 hours, and discovered the magic of self-healing. Despite one doctor predicting I won't live up to 30 due to my severe health challenges, I am already 35 and see myself living up to 100.

In 2017, a great flood threatened my dream and submerged our largest school hostel. It took several years and almost 3 years of savings and donations to build the hostel, but I was lucky my house was nearby on a hilly location. The following week, we relocated the entire school operations to my house. It was as if nothing had happened, although we had to create some extra wooden classrooms, and I went from been a new home-owner to becoming a tenant again. I had stayed in my new home for just eight months and was already making plans to propose to my girlfriend before packing out.

The submerged structure was pulled down, and the place is now converted to a full-functioning training farm. I was just grateful that my house was nearby, and that it could serve as the school. I couldn't get married again since I had to stay with a friend until I had enough to rent an apartment.

By 2019, my former home was remodeled to a standard school building which can handle 5,000 young learners. I have long discovered engaging in something greater than you can be extremely painstaking and lonely.

None. Bookers International School is not under any organizations.

Bookers’ runs an educational system that “pays for itself.”

With a reach of over 5,000 youths yearly, the program enables young people to sustain themselves. Full scholarships for schooling are offered to a large selection of students, while those participating in the non-schooling program receive free training on managing farms, entrepreneurship, keeping livestock and building and maintaining waste conversion devices. Profit generated from these activities benefit both the school and the students.

We included 7 innovations to educate and empower young people and below are some:

• 50:50 Education Model: allows 50% of low-income students’ population to pay tuition, while the remaining 50% from extremely poor backgrounds are on full scholarships. We want to be sustainable and not shut-down like most charity schools around.
• ByFE: Bookers Youth Farm Enterprise: an intensive Agritech program which educates young people age 12-25 years on how to farming, livestock and technology. Profits from our farm projects accounted for 25% of our entire annual revenue in 2019.
• BSRC: Bookers Street Reading Challenge is a yearly program that provides reading skills to homeless children. One of our beneficiaries Ayomide Olaoluwa widely read story was featured on the Financial Times after winning the World Bank 2020 Blog Prize.
• BEEP: Bookers Eco-Education Program: We challenge our young participants to tackle some of the environmental and climate change challenges around them. One of them collaborated with Bookers and co-founded De-Olivette Enterprise, an organization that transforms farm, educational and business waste into reusable materials.

Daily Activities: Our daily activities are multifaceted and cover education, farming skills, general skills, and sustainability education plus sensitization programs. We daily develop the raw skills of the young participants by engaging them in education, agricultural training programs, and other empowerment projects. What is central is our methodology, however we let our students identify the barriers they need to overcome and the skills and knowledge they will need to overcome this challenge. We allow them to manage the small businesses created by the school while we trains and supervise them to test their abilities, thereby letting each of them to do a peer to peer review, and learning more about the feedback from their peers and professionals regarding the cause and effect of their performances. We believe our model can be scaled with any unprivileged and uneducated population anywhere around the world.

Intermediate Outcomes: Create a paradigm shift among the youths into having confidence and believing in their abilities. In 2018, we launched our HFI: Home Farm Initiative and asked our participants to start a farm from the corner of their homes. Over 500 students now have farms and livestock with combined value of over $100,000. These were children who once relied on $1 or less daily.

Long term impact: 42% of the students who'd been through our skill programs are today working with same skills. Another 29% are currently in colleges studying related subjects with the skills they picked. We’ve raised young people with problem solving skill sets and mindset. 4 of our students designed one of our environmental products called SMAB: Smart-Mobile-Adogan-Biodigester, a plastic device that converts waste into bio-gas, electricity and fertilizer. The device has been installed into over 1,000 homes within Ifo community, and was the ONLY energy-product by students nominated for (NEF) National Energy Forum 2020 Energy Competition short-list.

It should be noted that diversity in experience, governance and culture is important to us and most of our team have different cultural backgrounds. The majority of our team has been with us since inception paying testimony to their total loyalty and their passion.  

Bookers currently serves 5,000 young people. Our secondary beneficiaries are over 15,000 people, and they include the retailers, buyers of our farm crops, livestock, sustainability and environmental products. It should be noted we have over the years empowered more than 2,000 street children learn how to read, although we couldn't absorb this population into our learning facilities due to our limited capacity. Also, we run different initiatives which includes "The Bookers Healing Club" which provides free counseling for young women battling with AIDS and depression.

By 2022 Bookers will also provide capacity building and technical support for our young entrepreneurs who are about to graduate from our programs. We are proposing to launch the "Bookers Leadership Academy" to train both present and former students who are already running or planning to start a business on how to become better leaders. The Leader Academy program will be a fully paid program which will award certificates, and cover topics such as: delegation, excellence, branding, PR, marketing, finance, loan management, and every aspect of running a world class small scale business. We are believers in Michael E Gerber's E-Myth book, and will tailor our programs around his impeccable experience. 

By 2025, we will have successfully expanded our learning facilities to benefit 10,000 youths yearly. We we want to educate and provide skills for 10,000 young people change makers annually. We hope the biggest next change makers and solution providers within Nigeria will be graduates of Bookers International Schools.

I want to develop my management skills, and learn how to better manage people and larger staff. I see myself learning new skills and get further education on how to become more effective, efficient and create greater impact while delivering my project.

I am already enrolled into the YALI: Young African Leader Initiative Diploma Network. I have recently earned several diplomas in programs that focus on gender equality, entrepreneurship for youths, and online education development in Africa. I have also used some other online training program to learn more about education, youths' empowerment and self-improvement.

I am constantly ready to improve, and I remain an ardent of Anthony Robbins principle of CANI: Constant and Never Ending Improvement. I am presently enrolled into the Commonwealth Online Master's Degree Scholarship 2020 and poised to starting an online master's program with the University of York.

During the lock down in my country; I noticed the importance of technology, and the need to digitize my organization's activities. I have since learned how to use WordPress, Adobe XD, CSS and Html. Just like Thomas Jefferson once said, it is quite amazing at what you can always learn if you keep learning.

I see myself becoming a world class material in my project; a prolific digital educationist, and I also want to encourage many young people to fall in love with life-long learning and how to gain modern skills. 

Technical Barriers: we have inadequate technology, ICT facilities and ERP system to support the growing demand of our learners, students and our desire for digitization. We have 15 computers to 5,000 learners; and we also want to expand our classrooms and sitting arrangement. Our classrooms are overcrowded, and we need to expand our learning facilities. This has made it expedient for us to turn thousands of young people, who want to benefit from our programs away. 

Financial Barrier: We are extremely underfunded, and this has limited our impact. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, our teachers had to co-share our computers and there were extreme delays sometimes due to limited data. Despite this, we launched an "online scholarship" to help an additional 1,000 young people.

With good funding and technical facilities, we see Bookers becoming the "Primary and Secondary MIT School of Africa."

There are zero cultural barriers in Bookers International School. We pride ourselves for a central belief called "Universalism," which means we welcome, respect and tolerate every culture, language, gender, ideology and religion. We believe diversity is unique and should be celebrated, and this are common in our colorful Cultural Daysprogram when we come together to celebrate our diversity through food, arts, theater, music and shows. English, French, Arabic, Yourba, Ibo, and Hausa are languages taught in the school, although our instructional and daily language remains English.

We believe our model can be scaled with any unprivileged and uneducated population anywhere around the world.

We created our “50:50 Education Model” to generate revenue from middle and low income students who are enrolled into our school for formal education. This group is 50% of our primary and secondary school students.

In 2014, our only source of revenue was this group; but by 2017 we had improved our financial situation by running a farming project that was earning the school roughly $20,000 annually.

We have since 2018 stopped using some professional like cooks, copywriters, bakers, tailors, painters to have our students who had learned these skills through our programs to handle these tasks. This saves us over $10,000 annually.

We have since focused on competitions, and we won over $5,000 plus other incentives in 2019 from different competitions. Our “Creative Writing” class produced the 1st Prize Winner of the UNESCO/Goi Peace Foundation International Essay Competition winner who won over 20,000 participants from 157 countries. Likewise, we were awarded $2000 grants by RUFORUM: the Regional Universities Forum which is made up of over 100 universities that award excellence in education, science and agriculture.

Our technical barriers are been slowly improved. In 2019 we created our first science laboratory and also added 5 new computers to the 10 we have.

The MIT Elevate winning prize will connect my team and me with great resources, funding and training opportunities which will totally transform my organization. Also, the exposure will greatly help in attracting more international attention to the good work we are doing.

The Nigerian Ministry of Education approved Bookers International School and provided us with a license to operate. They regulate our activities, and send officials for occasional inspections.

WAEC: West African Examinations Council; 80% of the schools in West Africa are not approved by WAEC (O-MOEST, 2019), which simply means you must have the necessary man-power (20 full-time, qualified and experienced teachers and above), also WAEC is obsessed with educational and training facilities. Bookers is a WAEC approved organization.

NECO: National Examination Council of Nigeria; operates like WAEC; both function like the American SAT and ACT.

YFAN: Youth Farmers Association of Nigeria; is a youth empowerment organization that has partnered with us to deliver modern Agritech skills to our young participants. YFAN only partners with schools with a successful school farm program generating 5 million naira annually ($12,000), and training 1,000 students and above. YFAN is one of our strongest partners.

RUFORUM: Regional Universities Forum, Uganda. After going for their accelerator program in the University of Cape Coast, Ghana and competing and winning their $2,000 prize, I have established solid relationship with the organization as a mentoring institution.

We have over 20 partners, many are small businesses who volunteer and provide skills and training for our youth participants. Some of the very notable ones remain: VVSG: Venux Vocational Schools for Girls; Logix IT Schools, Ixit.ng, E-vocation Nigeria, DOE: De-Olivette Press Enterprise, KAC: Kayode Adeosun and Co., and MICS: Medalist Institute of Computer Science; CEMSC: Chevron Micro-Finance Service, Lagos and others.

Mission: to give quality education and modern skills to youths. We accomplish this through our commitment to learning with skill-set development that forms a life-long professional background.

Vision: Bookers is committed to creating the environments that enable our students to experience an unparalleled formal educational and skill development journey.

Core Values: Young-women-centered, community, sustainability, integrity, innovation.

Summary: Bookers International School offers free quality education, agritech and sustainability training to low income and displaced young people in Nigeria. Full scholarships for schooling are offered to a large selection of students, while those participating in the non-schooling program receive free training on managing farms, entrepreneurship, keeping livestock and building and maintaining waste conversion devices. 

Products: We provide the following educational, vocational and sensitization programs:

50:50 Education Model, BEEP: Bookers Eco-Ed Program, BEAP: Bookers Entrepreneurial and Apprenticeship Program; BSRC: Bookers Street Reading Challenge; ByFE: Bookers Youth Farm Enterprise, BHC: Bookers Healing Club and BYWASC: Bookers Young Women AIDS Support Club.

CHANNELS: We deploy print media, social media, direct marketing and oral media.

KEY RESOURCES include: full-time, part-time and volunteer teachers, non-teaching staff, and our educational and training facilities. Our combined staff and volunteers are 152.

Market: Our if mainly Ifo which is uniquely positioned and borders Lagos, Africa most populated city. There are over 1,000,000 young people we can service and over 500,000 who visit Ifo Market weekly for farm products.

CUSTOMER VALUE PROPOSITION: Our customers want education, vocational and empowerment programs with developmental small business managed by only students.

We generate our revenue in from the following sources:

(1) From our School

(i) 50% non-paying students = 1,000 x $0 = $0 USD.

(ii) 50% of paying students = $60 per child (payable $5 monthly) x 1,000 = $60,000

(iii) 3,000 vocational students fees = $0.00

(iii) Yearly educational materials revenue = $15,000 yearly.

(2) From our School Farms

Livestock and food crops = $26,000

(3) Profits from our Environmental Products: 

I-SMAB and O-SMAB installation 2019

= $2,000

Total Revenue: $103,000

OPERATION COST

This covers administration, marketing, taxes, upgrades, depreciation, logistics, volunteers’ stipends, farm maintenance, workshop fees, training materials, teachers training, staff salaries, maintenance, levies, and reinvestment.

Our 2019 expenditure was $82,945

Click here to see a chart of our revenue model and see our traction.

Also, this was contained in our Annual Report of 2019.

We've raised only grants, and they are from the following organizations:

RUFORUM: the regional universities forum headquartered in Uganda provided a $2,000 funds to us in 2019 on behalf of Master Card Foundation.

Also, we raised 100,000 YEN through the Goi Peace Foundation awarded to our student. 50% of it was donated to the school activities and the other to the winning student.

ADBIF Farms Group awarded us a total of $1,000 in 2019.

Similarly, YFAN: Youth Farmers Association of Nigeria provided us a grant of roughly $1500 in 2019.

Similarly, we get donations worth $5,000 from our local community, well-able parents and partners within Ifo, Ogun, Nigeria.

We are seeking grants to expand our educational facilities, our skills and farm programs to train 10,000 youths weekly. We want to create a digital and e-learning infrastructure to reach more young people. Our ultimate goal is to educate and provide skills to 10,000 young people yearly. We will judiciously invest the funds into the following facilities and equipment.

1) 100 pieces of Hasee Desktop T3000 Intel Celeron Processor-2GHz Computers (4GB, 1TB HDD) Windows 10 - Black with screens (100 x $500) = $50,000

2) Compute rooms, accessories and electrical installation, etc = $12,000

2) 50 blocks of classroom with chairs and learning facilities for 2,000 extra students = $145,000

3) 90 HP, 4WD, Lovol 904 farm wheel tractor. TD series multi-functional farm tractor to train our youth participants and have a far more successful school farm. We want more young female farmers. This will cost us $19,000

4) 10 tons Israeli Kisluki twin mixer feed mill and hammer mill machine $24,000 (for our school livestock farms)

5). Finally, creation of our school online learning platform to reach as many as 10,000 students daily. This will cost us $7,000

6) Expansion of our school farms by 10 acres to train more young people, costs $43,000

Total = $300,000

We are hoping we can raise this fund through raised revenues, grants and donations.

Items/Activities

Amount in USD

Carryover balance

223

Teachers Salary

51,238

Volunteers Stipends

6,930

Teachers Workshops Training

2,390

Building and Refurbishment

7,380

Marketing

799

Yearly Scholarships

8,288

ICT

4,000

Energy

739

Supplies

1,200

Levies

869

Taxes

1,600

Administrative Cost

3,289

Others

1,000

Total

89,945

We reject almost 80% of our yearly applicants, not because they lack merit, but because we can’t accommodate them.

Rejecting our applicants is the hardest thing we do yearly. It breaks our heart when we tell these young people from extremely poor backgrounds: "sorry you are not selected" because we are acutely aware that rejecting them means we are also saying "yes" to the status-quo. It is saying "yes—you can go back to poverty, to illiteracy, to crime, to prostitution, to a future where you become a child-bride, to trying to cross the Sahara Desert and risking your lives to cross the Mediterranean Sea while trying to migrate to Europe.”

We know we can’t help all of them, but we know we can do more, and we badly want to empower. We want young Nigerians to become part of the solutions and not remain part of the problems; to become educated, life-long learners, skilled innovators who can provide jobs, food; youths who can solve the environmental and climate challenges.

Our greatest barrier remains financial and technical. We have had to borrow or rent several farming equipment and machinery; we have 15 computers to over 5,000 students; and our classrooms are overcrowded; we need to expand our learning facilities. We are overwhelmed with young people who somethings are at the verge of losing total hope in humanity and life.

The Elevate Prize can help us overcome these barriers through providing us with grants and technical assistance as well as mentoring.

We believe in building solid partnership with diverse group of people, organizations, stakeholders, and the communities around us to pool together our skills, resources, and experiences to create a better and far more impact and great social enterprise that makes a complete child. We are aware partnership means new, better and more opportunities that could make us far more effective; we are ready to work with the MIT Elevate Team and learn new data, skills and become better. We believe in daily improvement--we believe the Nigerian, the African problems can be solved if we constantly look for better ways of tackling them.

Winning the Elevate Prize will be a lifetime opportunity; it will connect us with some of the best minds in the world; it will provide us funding opportunities, and the ability to be mentored, trained and guided by some of finest professionals  (the elevate team) in the world.

We would like to partner with Wale Olajumoke, the founder of Result Accelerator and have him provide management and entrepreneurial programs with our school management. Result Accelerator is a tech and skills organizations like us, it is focused on developing businesses and transforming them into world class. 

Similarly, we would like to work Michael Rhema the founder of https://ixit.com.ng/ to train our students in apps and website development.