Rita Ezenwa-Okoro is a pacesetter in the Creative Industry. She is the Principal Communications Consultant and Chief Creative Officer of ROC, a strategic communications company that provides cutting edge solutions for businesses to become the go-to brand in their industries. ROC recently launched the first of its kind e-commerce advertising boutique agency that services businesses on a global level.
Rita is also the Founder and Lead Visionary of Street Project Foundation, an organisation that uses Creative Arts as a tool to facilitate opportunities for Youth Employment, Social Mobilisation and Cross-Cultural Dialogue. In collaboration with the Association of Advertising Agencies of Nigeria’s(AAAN) Committee of Women in Advertising(WIA), she convenes the programme called Digital Amazons, which aims at balancing the gender scale in the creative sector of the industry through capacity building and internship placements.
Rita (Street Project Foundation) recently won the Intercultural and Innovation Award organised by the United Nations Alliance of Civilization(UNAOC) and BMW Group in Dubai.
In this interview, Rita talks about the Award, how her Street Project Foundation has been impacting the lives of Nigerian youths and women using creative arts to develop their talents in many areas. Excerpts:
Let’s start with the honour bestowed upon you and your organisation recently. When you received the news about your nomination, how did you feel and what do you think were considered before the award was given to you?
It was a long process. We had to apply for the award, for one, and we had to be shortlisted for the Award. We also had to do some due diligence to show how well we ran the Creative Youth Boot Camp programme, our financial management capacity was assessed just to show that we are an organisation that can be trusted and is transparent and an organisation that’s got integrity. What followed the assessment of our proven track record was an interview that was coordinated by the United Nations Alliance of Civilisation and Accenture and of course, BMW Group. All of them were present and we were interviewed. The interview was the final stage and I think it was two weeks later or a month later that we then received an email saying that we had been selected as one of the top ten organisations across the world for the Award. Obviously, we were very excited.
That’s wonderful and I want to say congratulations on that. I want to ask you about your Street Project Foundation. Can you tell us how it began and what you actually want to achieve with your Creative Youth Boot Camp, which was launched in 2016?
Street Project Foundation started as far back as 2008. It was shortly after I finished my youth service. I was part of a community development service group called One House Music Unit during my youth service year and what we did was we took music to the streets, we used music as a tool for social transformation. I was Vice President of that group of young people. We came from all over Nigeria, as you’ll expect, it was the National Youth Service Corps. For one year we created music, recorded music, and presented it to people under Ojuelegba Bridge, under Ikeja Bridge, in schools and in churches. We composed music about the unity of Nigeria, that talked about ending ethnic and religious intolerance and talked about peace. Just doing that work for one year triggered something that was on the inside of me, and I think it was purpose. So, after my youth service year, I reflected on what I wanted to do and it definitely was to continue that work. How I wanted to do it, I didn’t know at the time. It evolved and in 2007, I had a clearer direction on how I wanted to proceed with this work. Concurrently, I was also pursuing a career in advertising, having studied Creative Arts at the University of Lagos. So, I tinkered with the idea a bit and started a programme called Street Praise, which eventually evolved into becoming Street Project Foundation. The whole essence is to use Creative Arts to facilitate youth development, cross-cultural dialogue and social mobilisation.
In addition, what stirred me up to do this has a lot to do with my background. I’m the last born of six children. I am the only one in my family who studied a course that is in direct alignment with my natural gift. You’ll notice that this is a challenge world over, especially in a country like Nigeria, where for many years having a white collared job was more prestigious than being a creative or being one in the orange economy. A lot of young people are unemployed because they are wasting a lot of their time focusing on building a career that in no way aligns with their natural abilities and so there is a quote that we recite in our organisation, ‘we believe we can make a sustainable living doing what we love’. Our capacity building model starts first with discovering and identifying what you love and by doing that, you can then hone your skills. This way, their work doesn’t feel like a job, because it’s something you love to do and when you’re able to hone the skills of what you’re most passionate about, it’s easier to thrive, develop the skill set of young people and as a result we are able to curb youth unemployment.
Another reason why Street Project Foundation exists is that we believe in the power of play and performance as tools to develop soft skills such as communication, critical thinking, team building and confidence building and also managing young people’s mental health. It would amaze you how much the Performing Arts or the Creative Arts allows young people to express themselves and express their emotions and in the process they experience development that allows them to thrive in life. That’s it in a nutshell.
There seems to be a new industry now in Nigeria, carved out of the creative industry which many young people are embracing and that is skit making. How involved are you in that as part of your intervention to develop young talents?
Yes. In general, we call it content development. A lot of our programmes are aligned to that, they encourage young people to create content. So, the Creative Youth Boot Camp, which we received the Award, allows for that as well. Our young people create stage plays, short films, and radio dramas and even paintings; they exhibit their work as well. The beautiful thing about the Creative Youth Boot camp is that we expose the young people to different genres of the Arts. So, even if you came in and auditioned as a musician, we let you explore what it feels like to be a visual artist and we’ve found out that it has proven to be valuable because our young people then discover new talents in that regard. Then the current project we are running with the support of VOICE/OXFAM in Nigeria implemented in collaboration with Enugu Youth Entrepreneurship Network (EYEN) is called ARTvocacy, where we are teaching our young people how to use Arts to advocate for social justice issues they care about. In that process, they create a short film, podcast series, a coffee table book and online skits that will be used to build and grow the ARTvocacy movement on social media. By and large, a lot of work we do with our young people is content development.
From your organisation’s profile, you have done interventions in Lagos and Abuja. Are there plans to spread it to other states of the Federation?
We have footprints in Lagos, Abuja and Enugu. We’re going to Enugu come January to activate the ARTvocacy movement. That’s where we are in the country, but our goal is to be nationwide, to be a national NGO that focuses on youth development, using Creative Arts as a tool.
You have also been involved in championing efforts aimed at placing women in a position using digital programme. Can you dwell more on this?
For many years I worked as a copywriter and concept developer. And so, I’m a creative through and through. For the many years I worked in Advertising, I was often the only female in the Creative Department. It was a challenge seeing females rise to the position of Creative Director. I faced that challenge as well in mainstream advertising and even as a communications consultant now, it is still a problem that needs to be addressed. Seeing that Street Project Foundation is an organisation that uses Creative Arts for youth development, it made a lot of sense to develop a programme that addresses this problem of female leadership in the Creative sector. Our pursuit led us to collaborate with the Association of Advertising Practitioners of Nigeria’s (AAAN) Committee of Women in Advertising(WIA) to commence the programme called Digital Amazons. It is a programme for female creatives in Digital Marketing, Graphics Design, Photography, Videography, Copywriting, Content Writing, Storytelling, Project Management and Enterprise Development. Exposing them to these, more or less helps them turn their analogue creative skills to Digital Creative Skills, and by so doing creating space for women in the Digital Creative Economy by developing their capacity. Why this programme is so intriguing is because the moment we are done with the training of these young women, we match them up with mentors and place them on internship in the Advertising, Media, and Digital industries. I’m glad to say that because of how well our pilots went in 2019, we got the support of World Connect in the United States to run another Digital Amazon programme early this year. And now, we have gotten funding from the United States African Development Foundation(USADF) and Lagos State Employment Trust Fund(LSETF) to train 200 young women in 2022 and taking women out of the labour market and getting them gainfully employed by giving them 21st Century skills they need.
There’s no doubt that COVID-19 has affected virtually every business across the world. How has this affected your organisation?
You know when crisis comes, it either breaks you or it strengthens you. Yes, COVID-19 came with a lot of bad sides, but it strengthened our capacity even more. We had always adopted a hybrid format of working in our organisation because we have staff in Lagos, Abuja, and Enugu. So, what strings all of us together is really being constantly online, working online and then when we have to run the camps, we need to be physically present. This existing structure helped us a great deal because it meant that we even had to strengthen our capacity even more in terms creating alternative models of running our boot camps online. I’ll give you an instance. In 2020, we were in the middle of the second cohort of the Creative Youth Camp: Art for Social transformation when COVID-19 struck us in Nigeria and we also had to lock down and shut down everywhere. This happened in week two; immediately, we had to start thinking about how we were going to run this boot camp virtually and at the time, our young people were limited because we work with young people who are from low income backgrounds. Not everyone of them had the kind of funds that allow them get on zoom consistently.
There is a development phrase we imbibe that says, ‘nothing about us without us.’ When we realized we had to close the boot camp, we had to speak to our young people and together we discussed ways in which we could continue to engage with them virtually. This led us to revolutionalizing the use of the WhatsApp platform for our creative programming.
On WhatsApp we were able to galvanize the young people, from March to August 1st, 2020, when they graduated from the program. It took them a longer time to graduate but we engaged them using the WhatsApp platform to create content for our YouTube channel. Some of the content they created were, Fake News Police – a five-episode programme that they shot from their homes in different areas; content was assembled and edited through this platform. You know when you’re talking about skits, we were able to put that together and edit it remotely and they were creating things like that. They also created a programme called Word for Word, which is a programme that has to do with teaching people sign language. This was made possible by our ambassadors who are hearing impaired. At Street Project Foundation one of our key values is inclusion, which means that we must always have persons with disabilities represented in our programmes. So, it was an opportunity to teach young people sign language and we had thirteen episodes created through interaction on WhatsApp and very limited interactions through zoom. In addition, we had sensitization content created, educating people about COVID-19. They created a jingle and an advertorial to tell people about safe practices to embrace to avoid COVID-19. This was how we were able to weather the storm during the peak of the COVID lockdown. Against all odds our young people still thrived during that period because we were creating, we were engaging them even though we were all locked down in our homes. Like I said crisis could either break you or make you stronger, and for us, it made us stronger. When we eventually returned for our in-person trainings, we saw the need to expand our curriculum to include mobile phone story telling. In subsequent creative classes, we started teaching our young people how to create short films using their mobile phones. We then had a short film created with mobile phones that has been aired on Pop Central Television and has also been nominated for an award. The Short film is called ‘Keeping it 100’ written and created by our Street Project Ambassadors. It’s currently on our website. It’s the first video you’ll see there. Against all odds we didn’t allow the circumstance in the world to weigh us down. Instead, we were innovative and I believe that was one of the reasons we won the Intercultural Innovation Award because of our tenacity as an organization.
At the end of the Creative Youth Boot Camp: Art for Social Transformation, which we ran mostly during the peak of the pandemic, we trained 100 change agents. 60% of them were accelerated through internships, mentorships, fellowships, scholarships, and grants. 12% of them being persons with disabilities.
What will you say are your plans for 2022?
There is a lot going on in 2022, like I mentioned, next year, we are going to be running the Digital Amazons’ Programme and building the capacity of 200 female creatives. We are also going to be running another edition of Creative Youth Boot camp: Art for Social Transformation in the second quarter of next year with the support of the United Nations Alliance of Civilization(UNAOC) and the BMW Group. The award which comes with a $20,000 grant will enable us replicate the project. Selected participants will be creating a Stage Play and a 13-episode radio drama that will talk about social issues that young people care about like xenophobia, Gender Based Violence, Ethnic and Religious Intolerance, Youth Unemployment, Political Participation of Young People among other things. We are still running our ARTvocacy programme, which I told you is a programme that we started running this year, which enables young people to use their art to advocate for social justice. It is designed to encourage young people to speak up and not shut up about the social injustice in our country. We don’t see it as a project, we see it as a movement. On Sunday, December 12, we activated the Artvocacy Movement in Abuja with the support of VOICE/OXFAM in Nigeria and next year, we are activating the movement in Enugu. As I said, the vision is to spread this movement across Nigeria and that way our young people will be able to direct their energy in a positive way because we know that right now protesting on the streets is unsafe because of how closed up and intolerant our country is becoming. This movement gives our youth a creative alternative for our leaders to see our young people being very vocal about real issues that are affecting us as a society. ARTvocacy creates an alternative way to advocate for these issues. You see our plate is full in 2022.
If the Federal Government or government at any other level gives an appointment, will you take it up?
You’re putting me on the spot now. As long as it’s a service to the people, I’ll be open to it and it has to be in an area that I’m strong at performing. So, it’s more like putting a square peg in a square hole. For example, putting me in a health sector would not make much sense because I’m not a medical doctor or in public health, but when it comes to youth development and employment, culture, media and communications, education, creative arts, and community development and an appointment for that comes up, I will be open to that.
What better way do you think the government can help the creative industry and by extension, the youths?
One practical way and I’m an advocate for this, of getting our young people engaged, is by creating the infrastructure and sustaining the infrastructure where young people can thrive. This is a big issue in development. One of the major areas where our cost is higher is finding space, adequate space where we can run our programmes. In Lagos alone, I know there are over twenty youth centres, but out of the 20 youth centres, maybe one and a half is actually functioning. Others are dilapidated, some have been turned to places of worship and it doesn’t augur well. In developed countries, there are resource centres for youths. And they don’t joke with it. There are resources centres, sports centres, creative centres, where young people go on a daily basis. After-school programmes exist. We don’t have these things. I’ve spoken about Lagos, we have no idea of how many youth centres are even available across Nigeria that are functioning or if they are in existence at all. In Abuja, I know there are centres that have been built but nothing is happening there.
So, it’s either they have the infrastructure and they don’t have the people who know how to run these centres properly. So, one practical step is getting infrastructure in place for youth development. An organisation like ours will be able to run this infrastructure across the nation because we have a blueprint on how to run youth programmes. And having infrastructure in place will create employment for a lot of young people as well because people have to man those centres and put them to good use. But they will also need to have the capacity to be able to run these places in such a way that truly the community should be able to see what young people are doing and see young people thrive. If we do not invest in our youths, there will be problem for this country. It’s beyond your typical institutions like schools and all of that. Much as it is important, not everyone can get into higher institution.
2023 we are going to have elections that will bring into the offices new leaders across the country. How will you encourage the youths to actively participate so that we can have a youth that will be in the helm of affairs in the country?
We have already started encouraging our youths to first get their voter’s cards and also to be present to vote and start preparing for leadership and also to participate in politics. One way of doing that is by being vocal using their various art forms. So, these are the ways we are sensitising our youths to participate actively in politics. It doesn’t always have to mean immediately go start vying for a position. It means first, get your voter’s cards, and Civic Education is very critical, understand all that there is to know, understanding the Freedom of Information Act so that they know how to question those who are in authority and make sure that we have a transparent government. The more we have a critical mass of young people growing in knowledge of Civic Education, the better for the country.
