Bright Jaja is a Social entrepreneur, branding specialist, filmmaker, motivational speaker, and youth leader who believes in Africa’s skills and opportunities.
Bright Jaja’s Career
Bright Jaja began his journey in 2012, when he founded the NGO Redance Africa. This NGO later grew into a powerful movement aimed at empowering young people in general to pursue whatever abilities they have with pride and dignity.
In 2013, following the kidnapping of the Chibok girls, Jaja played a key role in raising international attention to Nigeria by mobilizing over 6,000 students from 50 schools in Nigeria’s capital city (FCT Abuja) to dance for peace at the National Stadium. This action sparked widespread debate regarding the Chibok girls. That same year, he received the Abuja Young Entrepreneurship Award as well as the Abuja Advancement Awards for the most successful concept in the Federal Capital Territory. He was the youngest speaker at the first TEDx in Abuja, where he shared the stage alongside His Excellency Mallam Nasir El-Rufai and His Royal Highness Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, Emir of Kano.
He was one of the youngest national winners of Naija Diamonds, an initiative by Diamond Bank and Ebony Life TV to honor Nigerian heroes, in 2014.
In 2017, he founded iCreate Africa, a skill excellence and development hub, with the goal of raising the visibility and awareness of trained professionals by rebranding and presenting the value of vocational skills in the mainstream.
At the Africa Reformers Awards, he was honored alongside Mo Abdou and Maryam Uwais as an Africa Game Changer reformer.
The iCreate Africa CEO, a Nigerian-born entrepreneur, explains why he’s on a mission to rebrand important skills like welding and plumbing to make them more accessible to young people.
Bright Jaja, a 10-year-old boy growing up in Abuja, Nigeria, would travel to the local market where his mother worked as a merchant.
“Before I went to school, I’d help arrange her stock,” he says. “Then, after school, I’d go to the market to help her sell. I spent more time there than I did in the classroom.”
Simply put, Jaja, who was just included to Forbes Africa’s 30 under 30 list, was an entrepreneur from an early age.
Jaja is keen to “rebrand” technical and vocational skills that will be in high demand in Africa over the next two decades.
“I thought: ‘Why is it that young people aren’t doing jobs that already exist in the labor market?’,” says Jaja.
“Jobs like bricklaying and carpentry, for example. It’s because society has defined that, technical skills are for people who aren’t ‘educated.’ ‘Educated’ people go to university, get a degree and come out the other end as a lawyer, doctor or accountant. But that’s a stereotype. Education is everywhere.”
