By Prisca Sam-Duru

UK-based Bukola Jolugbo, fondly called Kiki, is the founder of Joshua’s Army, a movement devoted to building high-quality relationships between fathers and sons.

She works with parents to raise exceptional and wholesome young men. Kiki is a trainer, facilitator and host of various family-oriented events that foster healthy and functional families with a keen interest in teenage boys.

She brings her expertise as a Process Improvement Engineer to bear in her work with boys and their parents to create lifechanging processes that promote healthy family environments for the development of boys. Kiki, who is also an exceptional consultant in the UK Public Sector as a User Experience Analyst, coaches and mentors people from the Black Ethnic Minority group on maximising their soft skills and technical knowledge for career development and progression.

Seeing how both developed and developing countries are focused on raising better women in society, Kiki believes it is also important that we raise enabling men that align positively in the society. Due largely to high rate of unemployment and bad governance, the youth, especially boys, have mostly taken to crime such as fraud, money-making rituals, armed robbery, drug abuse and trafficking, etc.

As a result, Kiki thinks more focus on the boywill help mentor them into self-reliant individuals and responsible future leaders. That birthed her project, BoyzIIMen Institute.“When I decided to introduce BoyzIIMen Institute, it was the question of how can we produce outstanding world-class leaders and fathers.This can happen when these boys from their younger age get the right mentorship to enable them to move in the righ direction in life,” she explains.

The vision of BoyzIIMen according to her, is to raise the next generation of world-class leaders and fathers, disclosing that, “This I intend to achieve by focusing on the boys’ self-development. Through this development, they get to learn life-intelligence that enables them to become aware of themselves, their environment, and others, for maximum adulthood.”

“With the help of other thoughts, men facilitators work closely with these boys to lay a solid foundation in their journey to becoming world-class leaders and fathers,” she added. She further disclosed that BoyzIIMen was founded in July 2016 and has reached over 2000 families across the globe. Over 200 boys have passed through the Boys’ Academy (Boyz2Men Institute for age 16 to 21 and Boyz4Real Academy for age 12 – 15). On the strategy she adopts to push her vision, Kiki said, it’s mostly through training
programmes, summits and more.

“We’ve hosted seven exclusive dinner for fathers and sons, an in person conference for mothers of boys, various training programmes for boys and hosted the only summit for parenting today’s teenage boys for the past 3 years.” And to ensure the tempo is sustained, she said, “Based on feedback, this year, we are introducing a summer outdoor event to celebrate fatherhood and this time it won’t be just for fathers and sons, but for fathers and their children. It will be an outdoor event with various games, competitions, and activities to help fathers connect with their children in an unusual way.

The aim is to create the foundation for f a t h e r s , irrespective of the demands of life, to create great memories with their children.” Bukola, a passionate, experienced, and visionary woman of faith who has spent thelast decade-plus pursuing her interests in growing the capacity of boys and mentor each to their full potential and live plus lead as God intended, started with church service before moving into spearheading Joshua’s Army in 2014. Her mission is to close the empowerment gap between boys and girls or men and women. And since relocating to the UK in 2009,she has kept observing the growing attack against the male gender and asking, “What can be done for the men?” There has been a great degree of empowerment focused on the female gender, and Kiki believes that well brought up girls in a society filled with morally bankrupt boys wouldn’t make enough impact.

”There aren’t many male models in society today. And in the search for these male models, boys have gotten into dangerous communities and contexts.The crime rate, poor mental health and lack of personal development in teenage boys are growing with no known solutions. Families are dysfunctional and broken.These thoughts inspired what we do for the boys and their families at The Joshua’s Army.”