By Moses Nosike

Uloma Onyebuchi is young and passionate Nigerian who strives to ensure Nigerian youths develop their potentials to gain employment or become self-reliance. She also discovered that African youths are talented needed direction and empowerment to succeed and contribute to the society.

Led by this passion, she founded a youth development and empowerment hub, ‘The Bold And Beautiful Youth Foundation’, a non profit organisation to bridge career, entrepreneurship and leadership gaps that exist among African youths especially Nigeria, with cooperate office in Abuja, Nigeria. Following this, many young Nigerians have been empowered and have become exemplary leaders and pace setters in their career paths, successful entrepreneurs and in effect, socio economic change agents.

Uloma Onyebuchi

Why the name, Bold and Beautiful Youth Foundation?
We are asked the same question everywhere we go and the answer is simple. Personally I have always admired success and to be successful. You must be bold at taking risks and confronting your challenges as they come along, and your vision and goals must be bold. There must also be a willingness that comes with passion and tenacity to go head in spite odds in order to succeed in anything you set out to achieve in life. So, The Bold and Beautiful Youth Foundation is unconventional name that will make people wonder what the organisation is about and get them curious to find out about us.

What do you want to accomplish in life with the organisation?
As an NGO, our goal is simple, to help develop and empower as many iconic creative young Nigerians as we can, eventually extending it to Africa as a whole. We are constituted with the objectives of creating and executing career-launching opportunities that are intended to be vehicles of socio economic change in the live of Nigerian youths. We are dedicated to bridging the career gap of leadership, entrepreneurship among our youths like I earlier stated. Our motivation is to assist the release of new talents and leaders across board who otherwise may not have the chance to effectively express their inept leadership skills, talents and ideas. We are basically giving them the platform to achieve career goals.

What are your targeted audience?
Our target audience are young undergraduates and graduates between the age of 17 – 35years. We are a bit flexible given the high unemployment rate in Nigeria. We have accommodated participants a little above the age limit in the past.

Your challenges while trying to reach the audience?
Wow! The challenges are enormous, but for us challenges are mostly good things and we welcome it. It enables us to succeed; I will only focus on the major ones here. The environment we work in, is one of the greatest challenging environments in existence. However, we have been able to creatively and strategically find ways to overcome many of the challenges we encounter on daily basis in the field of work. First of all the concept of charity is not something Nigerians have grasped properly and they receive it with a lot of skepticism because many who had done in the past were not trustworthy. So, it becomes even more challenging to convince people to invest in the organisation. For that funding is one of our biggest challenges. Notwithstanding, we have been able to raise funds internally, government agencies, private organisations and individuals who have invested in our goals and continue to do so.

Have you made any achievement since you founded it?
We believe we have achieved quite a lot, even though we would like to empower more youths, but empowering 20 youths so far with all our limitations is quite significant. Our hope is that those 20 will empower another 20 and it becomes a chain reactions and trickles down. Our first annual project was in fashion where we ran workshops in all genres of fashion. From fashion designing to fashion styling, make-up artistry, fashion photography, modeling and body painting. We partnered with Hype (Harnessing Young People Early) Foundation to deliver the project. It was a huge success and we created an awareness that the fashion industry is a multi billion industry in the world and fashion entrepreneurs across the world are some of the wealthiest people and influencers in the world today.

Our young Nigerian fashion creative talents were exposed to world renowned iconic fashion entrepreneurs and experts who built their fashion businesses from zero to multi billion companies today. Our workshops were facilitated by these fashion experts who also shared their inspiring stories with our participants that shifted their thought process and paradigm 360 degrees. 10 outstanding creative participants were empowered and many internships awarded to a few participants by our able sponsors. We were the first to introduce fashion training workshops and seminars in Nigeria, I dare say and we pride in that.

Our next major annual project was on literary arts. We organised workshops and seminars on six different genres of literary arts; from prose to non fictional, script writing, journalistic writing, poetry and play writing. It’s been quite fulfilling impacting our youths and making a difference.

What is your advice to young entrepreneurs that want to make the difference?
My advise they take their time to identify their career path or what they have great passion doing. Once they identify it, they should strive to study and develop such skills properly. They should never be afraid to take risk or fail. They must ensure that where there are competitors, that their focus is not just on competition, but on building a product that is very unique within the same market and solution oriented.