A Day Inside the Africa and Everywhere Festival

Two seasons, twenty episodes and more than sixty thousand plays across eighty countries later, The Africa and Everywhere Festival and its convener, Oge Elumelu, wanted the conversation to leave the internet and land somewhere young people could use it.

The first edition of the festival ran for a single day and took the practical shape of a careers fair with four panels educating on the arcs of working life which includes how to get hired, how to climb, how to handle money, and when to stop looking for a job and build one.

Standing at the centre of the stage, Oge Elumelu traced the short but rapid journey that had brought everyone into the room, from a podcast that had run for two seasons and twenty episodes to an audience reaching across more than eighty countries and gathering over sixty thousand plays.

Helping people understand different industries had been rewarding, Oge Elumelu said, but it was no longer enough on its own. “How can we make sure that it translates to actual, tangible impact in young people’s lives?” she asked, and the festival was her answer, an attempt to turn an online community into an offline one and to build, in her words, a place “where opportunity is able to meet talent.”

Nigeria and much of the continent hold a vast and growing population of young people, she noted, and yet the road from graduation to a first job remains narrow. “We don’t want to just talk the talk, but really walk it,” she told the room, explaining that the gathering had therefore taken the practical shape of a one-day speed-dating internship and careers fair built to upskill young people and place real work experience in their hands.

Before she stepped back, she thanked the small internal team who had built the festival with her, along with the sponsors and partner organisations whose backing had turned an idea into a room full of people.

Panel One · “How to Successfully Climb the Corporate Ladder”

With the welcome barely finished, the first panel took the stage to weigh the long arc of a career. Moderating, Elumelu put a deliberately broad question to Toni Sanni, Sam Nwanze and Obong Idiong: how did your career start, and how did you reach the position you hold now?

Nwanze reached back three decades to a graduate in human nutrition who had quietly decided to build himself in three directions at once, in finance, in management and in the then-unfashionable field of technology, writing certification exams and living on very little in a friend’s house in Lagos while he did it. He cast the audience’s own moment as the one that would matter most. “Where you are right now is probably the most important part of your entire life,” he said. “There’s a stage where you build the foundation, there’s a stage for growth, and there’s a stage for legacy,” he added, placing the room firmly in the first.

Sanni spoke to the discomfort many would come to know, of being the youngest person, or the only woman, or the only one from a particular background in a room, and offered a single instruction. “Let your work speak for you. You don’t need to prove yourself to anyone,” she said. Failure, she argued, was not a verdict but material to learn from, since “if you’ve never failed, then you’ve never taken any risks.”

Idiong steered the conversation to mentorship, urging the audience not to wait for a formal programme but to study the people whose paths they admired and to build the kind of work ethic that makes others want to invest in them.

It was only after that first exchange that Oge introduced the man many had come to hear. Chairman, Heirs Holdings, Tony Elumelu, made his way up from the front row, took the microphone from his daughter after a brief embrace, and delivered a short address built on ambition and the mechanics of money.

He urged the audience to learn not only how organisations make money but how they might make it for themselves, and reached back to his own beginning, when a letter written directly to a chief executive turned a rejection into a first banking job.

Elumelu left them on a line that would echo through the rest of the afternoon. “Dream dreams, be ambitious, work hard, stay disciplined and don’t give up,” he told them. “Luck comes when preparation meets opportunity.”

Panel Two · “Breaking into Corporate Jobs: Tips and Tricks”

Where the first panel had looked up the ladder, the second returned to its lowest rung, the plain business of getting hired at all. Faith Nelson-Ojeaga, Yetunde Ayeni and Tomilayo Esan turned to what to do to make a CV better, and the advice came quickly and specifically. A graduate CV should run to a page or two, they said, though the real test is content rather than length, beginning with something as basic as a professional email address and a working phone number.

The document, they insisted, has only one job. “Your CV needs to answer one question: why you?” one panellist said, warning against generic applications and against CVs visibly written by artificial intelligence, which the recruiters in the room could spot at a glance. Ayeni added a note of caution about what to leave off, advising the room to reduce a home address to a city for safety and to keep referees’ personal details private rather than hand them to every stranger who receives the file.

For those who feared they had too little experience to show, the message was blunt. “You’re not looking for a job to be taught, you’re looking for a job to add value,” the panel told them, encouraging even a serious university project to earn its place on the page.

With the morning’s conversations done, the formal programme gave way to the day’s real purpose. The screens narrowed to a single instruction, networking time, music rose gently under the noise of the room, and the hall became a working career fair.

Fifteen organisations had come to recruit, and the interviews that would decide the festival’s thirty-seven internship placements began in earnest, candidates moving between tables with their CVs in hand while participating brands including Zapphaire, Nara and Zara, Saron, Omoni Oboli TV and Fara and Zara set up around the edges of the room.

For the better part of the afternoon, the floor ran on introductions and follow-up questions, the speed-dating format Elumelu had promised in her opening, and the point at which the festival’s promise quietly turned into appointments.

Panel Three · “The Importance of Financial Literacy for Young People”

When the panels resumed, the conversation moved from earning a living to keeping it. Group Director, Emerging Africa, Oghogho Osula, joined United Capital’s Onyinye Osunwoke and Ibi Ibru, who runs the financial education business Money Start, for a frank session on the money habits that outlast any single salary.

Ibru named the mistakes she sees most often, chief among them spending money before it has actually arrived. “Never ever spend money that is not in your account,” she warned, “no matter who promised you.” She pressed the room not to wait for a larger income before taking their finances seriously, since the habit matters far more than the sum. “The discipline you have with fifty thousand naira is the discipline that will meet you with five million,” she said, urging them to save and to invest in themselves while the amounts still felt small.

Osunwoke walked through the range of products open even to first-time investors, from mutual funds to trustee arrangements, making the point that a young person with little to spare is not shut out of investing but simply starting early.

Panel Four · “Entrepreneurship: When to Be Your Own Boss”
The final panel carried the day to the moment a young person stops looking for a job and decides to build one. Reni Abina, Yanmo Omorogbe and the doctor and health communicator Chinonso Egemba, better known online as Aproko Doctor, each traced an unplanned route into business.

Abina had been selling oranges as a child and doing friends’ hair for free until the requests grew heavy enough to charge for, and though she trained as a lawyer she moved quickly once she had decided. “I decided in May, and by July the collection had come out,” she said of the fashion label she launched almost on impulse at twenty-four, an age at which, she reasoned, she could still afford the risk.

Omorogbe called herself “an accidental entrepreneur,” recalling that a month before she co-founded the investment platform Bamboo the one thing she felt sure of was that she did not want to run a business, until a personal frustration, the absence of any simple way for ordinary Nigerians to buy foreign shares, and her father’s blunt line that “risk is for the young,” changed her mind.

Egemba’s turn came from a darker place, the memory of a patient who died in front of him during medical school for reasons that, he said, included plain ignorance. “We started all of this simply because of that single person,” he told the room, describing a mission that a radio station once dismissed as too dull to broadcast and that social media eventually carried into a healthcare media company and, more recently, a health startup barely a year old.

The Close
Elumelu brought the festival to a close from where she had begun it, at the centre of the stage. She thanked the panellists, the sponsors and the young people who had filled both the hall and the live stream, and sent them home on a promise rather than a full stop, telling the room that she would see them all again next year.

For a first edition, the day had done more than run a programme to time. It had taken the line its founder kept returning to, that this would be a place where opportunity meets talent, and made it literal for the young people who left with a placement, an introduction, or simply a clearer map of the road ahead.

Participants registering ahead of the inaugural edition of the Africa and Everywhere Festival held in Lagos recently.