Do it Now Now

Bayo Adelaja is the founder and CEO of Do it Now Now; which she founded in 2016 in response to gaps in the support available to Black innovators building tech companies and social enterprises in the UK and across Africa. The initiatives Bayo developed for Do it Now Now have led to awards by both Harvard University and Oxford University's Business Schools for her work to create and foster opportunities for under-served communities through technology. 3 communities/initiatives she designed to support underrepresented people in tech, were named "Top in Europe" by FT-backed digital news platform, Sifted. In 2018, Bayo was named one of the most influential women in social entrepreneurship in the UK, by Natwest bank, recognised as a Global change maker by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and in 2019, and her work was nominated for a Webby Award for work in public service and activism in 2020.

We are poised to redress the deprivation of resources, skills and tools that inequality of resource allocation metes upon the Black community in the UK and across Africa.

Through the provision of training in leadership, activism and entrepreneurship, we empower Black people to engage actively and beneficially in the communities in which we live. 

Through effective collaboration and the re-purposing of key resources, we're creating a world in which every Black person has the skills and tools they need to impact the world and create space for themselves and their community to co-exist peacefully. 

In just 4 years, with very little external funding, we have supported over 8000 Black people in 7 countries. We've run 54 programs and built 3 flagship initiatives that have won international awards and widespread support.

UK:

The Black population is systematically oppressed by social policy decisions that negatively and disproportionately affect our wellbeing and financial stability.

For context, I’d like to introduce you to the reality of Blackness in the UK:

• The households most likely to have a weekly income of less than £400 are from Black ethnic groups, at 35%. 
• 19.6% of the black population lives in the most deprived parts of the country, the highest of any racial group to be concentrated in deprived areas. 
• 14.7% of Black people also live in the most employment deprived areas of the country, again the highest of any racial group. 

In Africa:

The development of technology-based entrepreneurial efforts at scale will be the answer to the unemployment challenge in Africa.

Africa’s population is growing rapidly and is soon to become the largest and youngest population in the world, yet the continent is not creating enough jobs to support its booming population. Currently, over 50% of the youth population is unemployed and without effective intervention, this will continue to rise. 

However, the interventions that sustainable support African tech founders are few and far between leaving a gulf in their development and the subsequent stagnation of climbing unemployment.

In Africa: a virtual accelerator.

For four years we have supported entrepreneurs in Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Ghana, Zambia and Uganda to access expertise, technology and opportunities with international and local organisations that can help them catalyse the growth and impact of their tech enterprises. We’ve helped them gain investment, exponentially grow their revenue and expand their teams across the entire spectrum of the workforce; not just developers and engineers, but for e-logistics platforms, they’ve needed hundreds of drivers, and for education technology platforms, they’ve need hundreds of tutors. We’ve been helping businesspeople build companies that will hire thousands of people across Africa. 

In the UK: a virtual accelerator.

The majority of the organisations we support rely on grant funding, personal savings and in some cases pay-day loans to help them bridge the financial gap to deliver on their charitable objectives and social aims. They typically describe their beneficiaries as “people of ethnic minority background”, “young people”, “living in poverty”. On average, our 850 CSE beneficiaries support more than 200 people a month with in-person and online initiatives. Therefore, through our work, we have contributed to the stability and sustainability of organisations that support approximately 1,536,800 people a year.

UK:

We have run 46 entrepreneurship training programs supporting over 7684 Black entrepreneurs in the UK. Our beneficiaries are primarily working in:

• Arts and Culture
• Employment, Education and Training
• Mental Health and Wellbeing, or
• Citizenship and Community

The majority of the organisations we support rely on grant funding, personal savings and in some cases pay-day loans to help them bridge the financial gap to deliver on their charitable objectives and social aims. They typically describe their beneficiaries as “people of ethnic minority background”, “young people”, “living in poverty”. 

On average, the Black led organisations we support, provide interventions to approximately 1,536,800 people a year.

Africa:

Unlike any other large scale support system for entrepreneurs in Africa, we begin our support of them before they have made it into sustainability and success. 

The work we do helps them build businesses that can secure their income, grow their team and become eligible for funding later on. 

Our online platform allows tech founders and their senior leadership team to access skilled mentors from some of the best technology startups and investors in Europe and the US as well as more experienced founders and experts in their own countries. 

Do it Now Now brings charities, social entrepreneurs, startup teams, social innovators, investors, and philanthropists together to address social challenges, solve problems and support the development of Black communities in the UK and Africa specifically.

When we launched DINN, we were distressed about the lack of data concerning the needs and services available to Black people running organisations in the UK and Africa. As a result, we work closely with our community to understand their needs. By identifying and engaging with key stakeholders across the entire Black business landscape we have designed programs that meet the needs of our beneficiaries. 

The common denominator of the Black experience around the world is efficiently described in the Langston Hughes poem, “I, too”. The poem is set in the realities of the Southern slave plantations whose masters were known to habitually rape their slaves resulting in mixed-race children. The children were afforded certain privileges while continuing to be significantly deprived of any of the rights associated with being an heir of the master’s household. In the poem, Hughes meekly argues for equal treatment between the subject of the poem, “the darker brother” and his siblings, completely unexpectant of a positive resolution despite his protests. 

Like the main character in the Langston Hughes poem, I seek to redress the balance and aim to create a world in which the detrimental outcomes of racism no longer exist. Unlike the main character, my meekness has been replaced by righteous fury and passion for the development and empowerment of Black people globally. 

I launched Do it Now Now to be a vehicle for radical change in the world. It is an organisation that centres the needs and perspectives of Black people.  

Black people routinely face systemic discrimination that significantly reduces opportunities for Black people to live healthy and satisfying lives. It is my belief that through our accelerator programs in leadership, activism and entrepreneurship, we will see a new generation of Black activists, entrepreneurs and leaders; Black people who will utilise their resources, access, tools, creativity, skills and lived experiences to fight off the oppression, and succeed through the trials and tribulations so that they can usher other Black people safely to the other side. 

Until now, we have lived in a world in which the people with the power to change things have been complicit in the continued subjugation of our community by refusing to take opportunities to establish programs that will lead to transformative change and equality in our society. The people that are most in need of key solutions to aid social mobility should be the ones designing, and delivering them. However, with so few Black people being able to access the information, tools and resources needed to create authentic solutions to lived experiences, our future will continue to be held ransom by people who do not have a vested interest in our power and equality.

Prior to setting up Do it Now Now, I was a Social Policy Researcher at the London School of Economics, where my work garnered press coverage, including being quoted by former prime minister David Cameron.

I have also been a Grant Awarding Judge for USAID, Entrepreneurship Programme Mentor at the Tony Elumelu Foundation and designed the UK’s first-ever enterprise support program for women of colour, the BAME Female Founders Incubator for Hatch Enterprise. I was also the Diversity and Inclusion Consultant at Google for Startups UK and is a Fellow at Included VC as well as the Royal Society of Arts.

I have a wealth of experience and knowledge on open innovation, mentoring, educating business on diversity and inclusion and delivering crucial social impact programs. My initiatives have received coverage in The Metro, CNN, Huffington Post, Financial Times, The Independent, TechCabal, Ventureburn and Disrupt Africa.

Our COVID response:

The key challenges we are currently facing in the COVID-19 crisis are:

1. Difficulty transitioning to new models of delivery
2. Reduced fundraising ability and loss of core/unrestricted income
3. Reduced staff capacity 

With an unstable team and a lack of awareness about what the future holds, it is difficult for us as a Black-led social enterprise to access the support that is potentially available to us. The difficulty I was facing was finding a way to stay alive as an organisation so that we can continue to support our beneficiaries while also designing and implementing new systems and programs for them to engage with as they go through a similarly difficult time. 

While it is far from over, I designed new protocols and systems over a few weeks and onboarded my skeleton team effectively to take over the processing. I engaged with our beneficiaries and designed a new virtual accelerator to replace all our previous in-person work (which constituted 95% of our interactions with beneficiaries) and we have begun onboarding beneficiaries to the new platform. We are also planning for the future and engaging with government to ensure the crisis does not decimate the Black led civil society sector.

Over the past 10 years in the workforce, I have sought values as a champion of diversity and equality in everything I have done, which led me to the world of technology and civil society. My goal is to lead and influence these two sectors to become more diverse across the world, empowering more Black people to act successfully within them.

The two spaces that affect the development of our world more than any other are civil society and technology. Hence, for the past few years, I have been asking and seeking to provide answers to the question, “what do Black people need to succeed in this day and age?”, because if you help the lowest-ranked or least likely to succeed in a space, do so, you are inevitably building up the rest of the population that could seek to utilise those services in the future. 

That’s why Do it Now Now starts from the Black perspective and have worked with many organizations to help them develop strategies from that perspective as well. By working with some of the leading organisations in the world, I am impacting the access available to Black people globally.