MY IMMIGRATION DIARY 2 PRAISE FOWOWE

My journey into Innovation

If you read the first part of my journey you would have noticed my first innovation post University was ‘toasting commercial sex workers’ out of prostitution and taking them back home to their parents. As a matter of fact that experience showed me that while poverty was the overt reason many give but at the root of it was lose of identity.

I later discovered a pattern of child sexual abuse in over 300 commercial sex workers I met. I went into intense research because I was sexually abused and became sexually reckless till I started my long path to recovery. I already knew one of the consequences of sexual abuse was learned helplessness from my personal experience so I knew I had to do something that would directly empower children against sex predators and as at that time there were no comprehensive creative materials in the market.

My musical abilities kicked in so I wrote sexuality education songs and paid a budding music producer to what was good enough at the time. I also developed age appropriate sexuality education for what to teach children from 18months -18years and recorded the entire curriculum on DVDs and made a kit out of it. It became a life saver for several Nigerian kids with several testimonials from parents.

The more I sought to solve that problem the more I observed the lack of uniform parenting templates between several couples so my next research was an evidence based scientific approach to raising exceptional kids. This was one of my most intense innovations because to create good I had to study evil. So, I studied the radicalization of innocent children by terrorists and by flipping the scripts and testing the model the out of the box parenting emerged and it became a choice parenting programs for many African parents within Africa and in Diaspora.

My first unveiling of that model was at Erit in the UK and it spread like fire across a number of Nigerian parents with incredible results.

I am going through this long stretch to help you understand my journey into diaspora.

With all my solutions so far I knew I wanted to scale them globally and started thinking of testing them elsewhere but my first choice was Nigeria only to be met by brick walls by various stakeholders in government circles. If a ministry of education is not asking me to transport and feed teachers, I want to train on the use of basic sexuality education; a legislature is asking for sex from a links person before a project is approved. It made me feel like a sinner for innovating solutions but I was not deterred because I knew I had to create results locally before scaling my work outside afterall my mentor once said a millipede in Nigeria may not become a lion in America which I had since found out to be untrue because the environment can sometimes reduce a lion to a millipede and it might take a different environment to unveil the lion in him.

To be continued