The ambiance has the feel of a carefully staged trade exhibition hall; colourful, inspiring, and engaging. Everywhere you turn; the wall bleeds with inspiring inscriptions of courage, guts, hope and faith. The Genius Hub is more than a vocational training centre; it is a place for life’s skills acquisition, a centre where total human development is attained.
Isimene Whyte is full of energy; it is easy to tell how her mind works; the nearly perfect setting and craftily organised setting at the Genius Hub gives a hint of the founder’s vision to empower young people with skills to compete in the marketplace and the emotional balance for right decision making.
The Genius Hub was a creation of necessity; Isimene, an experienced social work expert in International NGOs and government space discovered huge skill gaps among university graduates and the young people she interacted with: “I started a research on how to solve the problem of poverty, in the course of the study I discovered that many young people lacked the ability to manage, they lacked online presence, they lacked self-confidence, had low self-esteem, had no smartphone to boost their businesses” Isimene listed as some of the reasons why the Genius Hub was established.
“Since inception, we have trained about 8,540 young people in 31 skill sets, improving their ability to discover themselves, enhance their chances of employability and entrepreneurship” the Hub’s founder affirms how the centre’s cooperation and collaboration with ActionAid have extended their core mandate of empowering young people with better alternatives to irregular migration. “We got in touch with IDRC (ActionAid local implementing partner in Edo State), we then started the conversation on how to engage with returned irregular migrants and potential migrants. In our centre, providing psychological support is the most important part of our job” she said.