Mapping Pathways to Opportunity

I’m a global social entrepreneur focused on creating paths out of poverty for young workers. My ventures tackle the skills and opportunity gap and help build financial security.

Through my nonprofit, Generation Enterprise, I’ve spent ten years creating such paths for youth in Lagos Nigeria (and, via a World Bank pilot, Delhi India). We’ve incubated 500+ “Social Mobility Enterprises” that upskill youth on the job and equip them to take over as owner operators. I’ve also worked with partner NGOs and state governments across Nigeria to transition 20,000 students from education to employment.

In the private sector, I’ve focused on building social impact into company strategy. At a PE-owned financial services firm, I created a credit-building, zero interest payday loan alternative for the 78% of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck. During Covid19, I helped a fintech startup launch a safety net for American renters, including a rent relief fund.  

I’m committed to solving the problem of dead-end work worldwide.

I will build on my existing technology that helps workers a) map out the in-demand skills and b) track their progress as they close skills gaps, boosting job performance and earning potential.

My project: an “Opportunity Mapper” technology that helps workers identify not only recommended in-demand skills but also recommended “opportunity rich” companies where workers enjoy fair pay, healthy work conditions, and opportunities to advance.

Workers will use Opportunity Mapper to 1) identify and leave exploitative “bad jobs,” 2) map the skills they need to unlock new opportunities and promotions, and 3) take those skills to employers who provide “good jobs.”

Opportunity Mapper will be a kind of decentralized digital union, linking worker health and growth to business health and growth. No worker will ever be trapped in dead-end work again. They’ll always be able to map a path out.   

The problem with “decent work” is that it’s too rare and inaccessible for far too many.

The UN notes that 783 million people worldwide are “working poor:” working but not earning enough to lift themselves out of poverty. They are trapped in “bad jobs:” stuck in cycles of poverty, insecurity and hopelessness, versus “good/quality jobs” with living wages, basic benefits, advancement/growth opportunities, wealth-building/financial security support, and a work environment that’s fair, safe, and respectful.

The problem has both supply-side and demand-side roots.

On the supply side, youth leave school lacking the most basic employability skills. Low-skilled, low-income youth end up trapped in dead-end jobs, often in the informal sector. They are desperate to increase their earning potential and job stability, but don’t know how to become more employable or valuable to the labor market and can’t afford further education. They stay trapped in dead-end work, no matter how exploitative.

On the demand side, businesses adopt a “churn and burn” HR model where frontline labor is cheap and not worth investing in. Owners and managers don’t know how to upskill their workers or scale up their operations, spending time micromanaging and firefighting and staying small. Some are downright discriminatory and exploitative.  

The goal of the Opportunity Mapper technology is to break entry-level and frontline workers out of dead-end jobs (by boosting their skills and the opportunities available to them).

This technology is a Google Maps meets AI coach for careers. It uses machine learning to map recommended skills and career paths and daily behavioral nudges to close worker skills gaps.

• In each target community (starting in Lagos), we collect top in-demand skills by employer type and feed them into the technology.

• We recruit partner employers and work with them to provide the technology to their frontline/entry-level workers. (Employers join to get peer benchmarking data and boost worker productivity; workers join to get credit for their work and unlock promotions).

• Participating workers use the tool to boost their skills by:

A) seeing in-demand skills data and mapping a personal on-the-job learning curriculum,

B) logging their work every day and getting daily bite-sized coaching and behavioral nudges, and

C) getting employer feedback and earning certification for competencies consistently demonstrated on the job.

They can also explore their options by:

D) reporting on working conditions at their employer and seeing similar reports from other companies, and

E) comparing career pathways and opportunities across employers.     

The project focuses on low-skilled entry-level and frontline workers in Africa, the world’s youngest continent. Their numbers are vast: 15-20M youth will enter the African workforce each year for the next three decades, and the skills gap will trap over as many as 90% of them in dead-end work (low pay, poor working conditions, few benefits, no career paths).

They are part of the working poor ($2/day) and disproportionately in industries hard-hit by Covid19 (retail, hospitality, personal services).  

Our team has trained some 20,000 such young workers and placed thousands into formal sector careers using an early skills-only version of the Opportunity Mapper tool. We’ve also worked with 500+ employers and led various capacity building initiatives for African governments. We understand and are actively co-creating this tool with both groups through pilots and regular focus groups.

The young workers we know say this project will empower them with unprecedented transparency and insight into potential roles and career paths, required skills, and the compensation and working conditions to which they are entitled. The result? They will be less likely to feel trapped in dead-end and exploitative jobs knowing they can boost their earning power by building skills valued by the market.

I developed the original prototype for the Opportunity Mapper tool in 2016 to help my nonprofit, Generation Enterprise, upskill youth from the local Makoko slum in our portfolio of “Social Mobility Enterprises.”

In each “SoMoE,” we mapped out the skills workers needed to master at each stage to automatically unlock a promotion, and we had a team of social workers constantly observing performance, logging feedback, and providing skills-boosting coaching/training. Using this system, we scaled a cleaning company from 6 to 300 workers, and successfully handed over control to the top performers, who’d gone from cleaning to running  everything from HR to inventory management to client service. These young women would never have had such a growth opportunity anywhere else.

Best of all, local Lagos businesses started asking where we’d found such good workers. We explained that they weren’t “found;” they were “made,” and they asked us to “make” good workers for them. We started turning the system of paper files and social worker coaching into code, and used the new technology with businesses from small (local cafes) to large (Spar Nigeria).We even used it to upskill 20,000+ Nigerian graduates for their first jobs, in partnership with the Ministry of Education.

I’m lucky. I’ve had a career rich in opportunities to build skills and do "good work."

Work itself has been a theme in my career, whether bridging education and employment in Nigeria, augmenting worker benefits in the USA, or designing a Digital New Deal for pandemic-displaced services workers. I’m currently working with the UN on Sustainable Development Goal #8: “decent work.”

But “decent work” seems too low a bar to aspire to. And most work isn’t even “decent:” from the slums of urban Nigeria to the heartland of America, I’ve seen how bad work means financial insecurity, isolation, low self-worth, resentment, and hopelessness. The situation has only worsened in a time of Covid19 mass unemployment, uncertainty and despair.

So often, discussions of the future of work and the fourth industrial revolution just assume that the divides between good work and bad work, opportunity and hopelessness will only deepen. But another future is possible.

I’ve realized that all my projects around work (getting it, keeping it, making it more humane and “decent”) were really about unlocking human potential and creating opportunity – the set of circumstances that make it possible for humans to grow, become self-sufficient, and fully participate in society. 

I’ve spent my career focused on creating paths out of poverty for young workers.

Firstly, I’ve built deep subject matter expertise in the areas of social enterprise management, tech product design, and international development. I studied microfinance at Wharton when the school first published Muhammed Yunus’s book, and new venture development and social enterprise strategy at the Stanford GSB when it launched the SEED initiative.  

My social ventures have been recognized by the Drucker Institute and the HBS Association of Nigeria and incubated by the World Bank, Project Redwood, and the UN Innovation Lab for the SDGs. Our findings and insights have been published in the MIT Innovations Journal and shared at CGI U, the Wharton Social Impact Initiative, and the Stanford Center for Social Innovation.

Secondly, I’ve built a deep global network of investors and supporters, cross-sector partners, and most of all, diverse teammates whose talent I’ve had the pleasure of nurturing over my ten years in the field. From my first managers in equity research and at McKinsey to new contacts through the Skoll World Forum and Opportunity Collaboration, I’ve received generous funding for my work. I’ve also maintained strong partnerships with fellow NGOs and governments at every level, both in Nigeria and here in the USA.

Lastly, unlocking human potential is a passion of mine. I study HR best practices in learning and development, attend conferences on capacity building, and have built a strong research base that informs every design decision in the Opportunity Mapper technology.  

For three years, my team’s Ready Set Work program bridged education and employment in Nigeria by 1) placing unemployed university graduates in small businesses and 2) continuously upskilling them on the job. It worked so well that the Ministry of Education adopted the program and subsidized graduates’ salaries.

But after the 2019 elections, everything changed. After many meetings and despite campus-wide student protests, we realized the new administration didn’t want RSW.

We tried everything to save it. In September I even tracked down the Lagos State Governor during his UN trip in New York. Reluctantly he restarted the program in November, but only as a stripped-down traditional training program, and without us.

Setbacks happen everywhere, especially with government partnerships, especially in Nigeria. In 2009, I launched a microfinance project for Lagos’s street youth, only to have it shut down and looted by local volunteers once it took off.

Such setbacks teach risk management and resilience. And the potential impact is worth the frustration. Now I’ve got new relationships in the federal government, and a new goal: get 500,000 youth work-ready via the national N-POWER workfare (work + welfare) program, supported with new technology: my vision for a skills mapping tool.   

Leadership involves articulating a vision and mobilizing teammates and resources to realize it. It also involves humble listening and learning.

I practiced these leadership skills when I launched my Early Access product, rallying my company, Jackson Hewitt, behind the mission of “Working Hard for the Hardest Working.”

It was a hard, multiyear campaign getting JH, American Express, Republic Bank, and the FDIC on board with my vision for a smart alternative to payday loans.

But the hardest sell was to the folks it was designed to benefit.  

Get up to $400 advances in minutes, PLUS build credit, all as part of your prepaid card? No minimum credit score, no late fees, no interest? Customers thought it was “too good to be true.” From San Antonio to Oakland, I learned how deeply customers mistrusted financial services, with their minimum balances and hidden fees.

So I pressed pause and met with community leaders and nonprofits, holding workshops on financial security – and listening. Only then could we begin to discuss, in Americans’ own words, in their own spaces, the need for a “lifeline” in emergencies. 

Their eventual embrace of Early Access was humbling and left me committed to leadership as co-creating change.