By Audrey Lotechukwu
TUES 07 SEPT, 2021-theGBJournal- ‘’I would love to help a lot of kids with talent across Africa learn about technology online. Imagine what it would be like if a million people in Africa have IT degrees. Imagine that. Imagine the impact of that across the African continent. This really captures the image of the reality, ’’ Toks said to kick-start discussion on his most passionate journey.
‘’My primary question at the beginning was; how can I provide the best education to the poorest people across Africa. I did a lot of research and figured out how to segment the UK education system and also to digitize and provide education at scale. I wrote a book about this which I titled ‘’Digitally Educated’’ and I actually set up a college to deliver education digitally. We are getting ready now to launch the Digitally Educated , and I would like your help.’’
The mission is simple-just to identify brilliant and disadvantaged kids across Africa. Once that is accomplished they will be equipped, educated, empowered and then their progress documented over time.
There would be an online competition-crowd sourced- which Toks expects to go viral soon. This will allow the winners to bubble up to the surface. Winners of full scholarship would actually be named after their benefactors and ‘’I am looking to kick-start this personally by sponsoring 10 scholars- that would be named 10 Toks Oyegunle Kotoye Scholars,’’ he said.
‘’To scale this to a million Africans, there is the need for a financial model to make that work. I have given it a lot of thoughts and came up with what I call simply-the Cyclical Financial Sustainability Strategy (CFS).’’
It simply involves establishing an endowment fund where the scholarships that are donated by our sponsors are converted to loans to the students.
His organisation will help them get great jobs in the end and when they get the jobs they repay the loans and then they use the repaid loans to fund future scholarships.
The sponsors he seeks are categorized and their benefits outlined. The Premium Sponsors packages go with full scholarship including technology kit and tuition. The benefits here include tax relief for corporate sponsors and corporate social responsibility (CSR) bonus.
The Diamond Sponsors – Full Tech kit including lap top, smartphone, mobile broadband.
The Gold Sponsors- Tech kit components/ books including laptops, smartphones, mobile broadbands, books and magazines.
Toks said, ‘’ideally, the strategy is to set up a fund that becomes a perpetual source of funding to grow this over time.’’
Toks studied IT for his first degree. Then he obtained a Masters Degree at City University, London. He is also an alumnus of the Harvard Business School and Lagos Business School.
An IT Consultant and once an Investment Banker, he has extensive experience in rolling out different technologies across Africa and in different countries. At the moment, he works as a privacy and cyber security specialist and he is a Technology Entrepreneur.
10 years ago, he wrote his first book which was inspired by the desire to help Diaspora Nigerians and Africans to understand how to contribute to the development of Africa.
‘’In that book, there is a chapter that reveals how education can be used as a tool, and I really think that that chapter spoke to me pretty deeply and the book helped me meet a lot of African Presidents, it got me delivering a lot of speeches and talks across Africa and it’s been quite interesting since then,’’ he said.
He told an interesting story also of how he actually got into the charity world.
‘’A couple of years ago we started getting a lot of request in my consultancy from charities who wanted to know how to comply with new data protection laws. Some of them really couldn’t afford our fees. So I had an idea on how to donate my little knowledge and so I wrote a little book ‘’The GDPR Compliance Blueprint for Charities’’ and I distributed that widely and trained a couple of the charities and that set me up as an expert in the charity space and I started getting a lot of request from many of them.’’
Recently, he took up work at Battersea – a very famous dog charity in the UK.
‘’It was when I was working there that I started to realise the potential of the UK charity to do tremendous good in the world.’’
The Tech guru recently lost his father. In the cause of the burial of his equally great father, he experienced what he says is an ‘’Epiphany.’’
‘’It suddenly dawned on me that life is very short and the only way to any form of immortality is in the legacy that you leave behind- who you have impacted, who you have helped. The more people you help, I think the better your legacy is.’’
Toks has been truly blessed after starting out in relative poverty. Amidst all of that he was able to quickly figure out what technology is all about and that has helped take him to places where he said he couldn’t imagine he could have gotten.
Winning the African Entrepreneur of the Year Award was a big highlight, particularly getting the award from a former world welterweight boxing champion, legendary Lloyd ‘’Ragamuffin’’ Honeyghan.
He has a lovely family, has been featured in the media severally.
‘’It’s been a great life and I really don’t take all of these for granted,’’ he said with great satisfaction.
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