BMGA Foundation

The BMGA Fellows Program is a social impact initiative designed to narrow the gender skills gap amongst university students and recent graduates in Africa. It is deployed by the BMGA Foundation and powered by BMGA Enterprise Limited. The program approaches the issue of unemployability of female university graduates by equipping them with employability skills and providing them access to world-renowned professors and organizations. It also provides participants with access to global leaders, internship opportunities, coaching, mentorship, and soft skills such as problem-solving, communication, emotional intelligence, and teamwork.

Funding received from the Elevate Prize would be used to expand the program’s reach across Africa, develop a more robust LMS that improves learning via visualization, provide African themed content for all the courses, develop a  psychological component of the program where young women can seek counseling for past trauma, provide opportunities that allow participants to be competitive on a global stage such as study abroad and shadowing of executives, provide a three-month stipend to all participants of the program which gives them a safety net while they job hunt, create a robust alumni network for all the Fellows, and provide a starter package to Fellows that includes a laptop.

I founded BMGA Enterprise Limited because of my desire to invest in human capital within Africa. The organization's DNA is focused on the empowerment of women, which is why I established the BMGA Foundation to provide an outlet for us to deepen our commitment to address issues that pertain to women in society. The foundation is focused on addressing the challenges that limit African women from being active contributors to the Gross Domestic Product of Africa. We believe that investing in women for a gender-balanced society translates to investing in strong and sustainable economies.

In particular, we ensure that the work we do is focused on democratizing access to quality education for women. Through the BMGA Fellows Program, we aim to redefine the societal narratives of women and improve their involvement in the social, economic, and political development of society.

We will empower over 10,000 women in Africa directly or indirectly through the transformational domino concept in five years. This empowerment is already evident in the impact demonstrated by the 2020 cohort. Our Fellows have started smaller capacity-building programs for young women within their communities, published books to empower young women, and several have increased their volunteerism on women-related issues.

The problem we are solving is the unemployability of women in the early stages of their careers.  According to the World Bank Group, there are 200 million students of tertiary institutions across the world. In Sub-Saharan Africa, only 38% of these students are female. Also, a report by British Council estimates that only about 8.8% of female graduates in Africa receive a job offer within the first six months of graduation due to a lack of essential skills.

Based on research, employers have been frustrated about the skills gap exhibited by recent university graduates in the workplace. Research shows that employers are satisfied with the disciplinary knowledge of graduates, but they are dissatisfied with their interpersonal qualities and soft skills.

The BMGA Fellows Program is deployed by BMGA Foundation to equip young women with employability skills and provide essential resources for a successful career in the 21st century, such as high-level courses taught by world-renowned professors, access to global leaders, internship opportunities, coaching, and mentorship. 

For the first cohort in 2020, we selected twenty-four participants from Nigeria. However, for the 2021 cohort, we will admit fifty young women from Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, and Zambia.

The BMGA Fellows Program consists of eight components. These include the BMGA eLearning platform, which hones the Information Communication Technology skills of participants; live lectures with renowned professors or subject-matter experts that mirror the meeting style of learning; the Champions of Africa’s History Lecture Series, which shines the spotlight on forgotten female African heroes that are examples to our young women; book discussions, which focus on examining books that help participants understand the dynamics of modern business successes and failures; the BMGA Leadership Speakers Series, which provides participants with the opportunity to learn directly from a distinguished array of global leaders with exemplary careers; a business case competition, which is a team-building and complex problem-solving element of the program that is designed for participants to identify pertinent issues within an industry in Africa and proffer viable solutions; peer-to-peer mentorship, which provides access to mentorship from graduate students in reputable universities such as the University of Cambridge; and post-program mentorship, which allows Fellows to gain resources that will help them navigate the complexities of the business environment.   

In addition, the program offers sessions where experts teach on Health & Wellness, Gender-Based Violence in the Workplace, Entrepreneurship, and Strength Finding.

In the 2020 cohort of the BMGA Fellow Program, 20% of the participants were first-generation students, and 18.2% were from the Northern part of Nigeria, which is considered one of the country's most impoverished regions. 

We have a quota that ensures that young women from marginalized communities are part of the program. This is to provide these young women with the resources and skills that will enable them to be active contributors to the social, economic, and political development of their communities. 

The three-month post-program assessment of the 2020 cohort also showed that: 50% of the Fellows received a job offer, 6.25% received a salary increment, and 6.25% were accepted to a graduate school. All these achievements were credited to the learnings from the program.

Additional findings from the assessment showed that 84% reported a significant increase in their communication and emotional intelligence. The program also recorded an overall 90% success rate in achieving its core objectives.

The success of the 2020 cohort shows that the program effectively addresses the problem it has set out to solve.

For more information, please download our Impact Report - 

www.bmgaenterprise.com/impactreport