By Florence Amagiya

The name Loretta Alao may not be popular, but her yearly sponsored Scrabble competition in Secondary Schools known as Scrabbulympics is, and has come to stay.  Mrs Alao through this social intervention impacts well over a thousand public school pupils annually during the one week Scrabbulympics event.

At the last edition  which held in 2013; the winners of the competition from public Schools were taken abroad to the World Youth Scrabble Championship as part of the prizes given to the students. 

 Last year, scrabbulympics couldn’t hold in Lagos state as scheduled because of the Ebola outbreak. Loretta has more than fifteen years working experience in Brand Marketing and Public Relations.

She manages multiple strategic Brand Teams that oversee marketing, communications, research and development, training, supply chain, customer service and operations.

She had previously served as a Senior Vice President of Brand Marketing for Uni-Consult, a company who has managed project for numerous multi-nationals.  She is on the board of several start-ups and holds sway as the COO of the CIDL group. She oversees a client portfolio that boasts of many multi-nationals like Julius Berger, Chevron, Airtel, etc and oversees company tasks cutting across service lines including Strategy design, development and deployment, stakeholder engagements, partnerships, consultancy and project management. 

In this edition, I introduce the brain behind scrabble competitions in Secondary Schools in Lagos state. She is a mother, a wife, and seasoned administrator who believes in hard work and integrity. 

Loretta Alao was born over forty years ago in Lagos state; Life was not a bed of roses in her formative years but she was trained to make the best of the little resources that were available. She learnt quickly to cope and adapt, and never lost sight of the bigger picture. Rather than succumb to challenges, she developed a can-do spirit at a very young age and learnt to make the best of whatever was available. This invariably helped her to develop a strong work ethic amongst several other life skills. Which today manifest and make themselves evident in her many roles.

She’s always very proud to say that she’s a product of public schooling having attended Ideal Primary school on Falolu road, and subsequently Ideal Girls Secondary School on Randle Avenue in Surulere.

She left secondary school at age 15 in 1989 and was enrolled into May-Day college for preparatory studies for tertiary education in 1990. She read Accounting at Ado Ekiti University and holds an MBA from the London School of Business and Finance (LSBF) United Kingdom.  Loretta is a testimony of how integrity and hard work can pay off, when God is in the middle of it! As they say, “preparedness meeting opportunity translates to success”. Loretta met the young man she eventually got married to when she was only a teenager. Today, they are happily married with children.

Personal life

According to her, hard work, belief and perseverance have been the key to her success, including prayers. Loretta also believes in working for herself and to her, the advantage is that there is no particular closing hour, as she is her own boss.

As she is grateful to God for her husband and blessed with three beautiful children.  She is also grateful for surviving cancer and being alive to tell the story. In fact, that birthed the give- back to the society.

It is very difficult to catch a break; you’re bursting with ideas and no-one is willing to listen or hear you out. If it’s important enough you reinvest time and effort again and again.

Projects and challenges

Loretta is a project manager and Administrator. She also does stakeholder engagements for some firms. But it wasn’t always like this as she had gone through her own share of setbacks. There were times she had written proposals and taken to companies only to be rejected or asked to wait long queues.

Other times, her ideas were stolen or she was advised to re-write the proposal and at the end, losing the ethos of the idea. However, the trick is to always see the cup as half full rather than half empty…. You must have a strong belief in what you’re selling.

Give- back to the society

As give- back to the society, she has set up a foundation to challenge the intellect of the students in their formative years after a researched work. As a product of public school over the years, she has realized that the standard of education has dropped. And this is due to the lack of resources, incentives and stimulation; more attention needs to be paid to the quality of the education structure and delivery.

In a society where most parents have handed their responsibility to the schools, it becomes overwhelmingly difficult for teachers to cater for the huge number of students, more so when they are poorly motivated.

After so much planning and research, Loretta discovered that the public schools can get back what was lost if the students can have intellectual challenge added to the curriculum and the instructors are highly motivated and are involved in the process.

That birthed the competition known as Scrabblulympics in Lagos Public schools. The game creates healthy challenges between scholars and their instructors, develops reasoning and cognitive skills, improves intellectual capacity and so much more. Scrabble is a healthy wholesome game that enhances scholastic endeavour.

She wanted to give something back to the society through a shared passion she had developed with her husband over the years. In the last three editions, Loretta’s initiative had given out two brand new cars to school principals, a brand new School bus, 50 laptops, 25 PSP players, 20 phones, 10 refrigerators, 10 Generator sets and trips for 5 persons to Dubai and so much more…

Read on…