All through my day at Innov8Zaria, I kept thinking about the people who were not there.
The people with certain barriers – barriers that something as simple as knowing and exposure could solve.
Those without media reach or a communication ecosystem. Those totally disconnected from growth conversations. And they are not only in the grassroots.
They are on the roadside. In offices. In stores. At mechanic workshops. At mai shayi joints. They are the people who do not see value in public speaking events.
Sitting in one of the Day 2 sessions, I realised that everything being discussed – skills, positioning, relevance, global opportunities – assumed one thing: that you already knew what to look for. That you already had language for it.
The room was full of people being told how to integrate skills, how to upskill, how to stay relevant. But outside that room are thousands who don’t even know what they are supposed to integrate into.
If you no know, you no go know weytin you need.
We talk a lot about the informal economy powering the majority of our people. Yet, these same people are often excluded – and programmes are intentionally not designed with them in mind.
They have nuances: language barriers, limited time, gaps in concept understanding, and mindset limitations that mere motivational talks could begin to shift.
As a boy, I used to wonder: if Nigeria is the giant of Africa, why is it so hard to thrive?
Now over 230 million strong, with the North alone accounting for more than half of that population, the scale of potential is impossible to ignore. Nearly 70% of young people in the North-East and North-West are under 25 – that’s tens of millions of possible dynamos.
But I’ve learned that population only signals potential, not prosperity.
According to Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics, about 93% of the employed workforce – roughly 66 to 70 million people – operate within the informal sector. In the North and North-East, young people rely heavily on doing informal work in agriculture, petty trade, and services, often due to insecurity, limited access, and skills gaps.
The informal economy keeps people alive. But without the exposure, structure, and pathways, it also quietly traps many of us in repeated cycles of low productivity work and limited growth.
And that is the gap Day 2 kept reminding me of – not a lack of talent, but a lack of access to knowing what is even possible.
