Inwelle Study and Resource Centre

Registered in 2005, Inwelle Study and Resource Centre (Inwelle Centre) was started by Professor Christiana Okechukwu who, as a 26 year old widow, suffered poverty and marginalization while raising her three daughters. Recognizing that access to learning lifted her and her three daughters out of poverty, she decided to design a program that would give youths, especially girls, skills to enable them earn wages while pursuing education and in this way break their poverty cycle. Envisioning a world where equal opportunities for women, girls and vulnerable youths cannot be denied, using technology to empower marginalized voices and leveraging girls in remote village to embrace life in the field of science and technology has become part of Inwelle Centre's focus since inception. Our mission is to promote gender equality and the empowerment of women, girls, vulnerable youths and local communities to facilitate expanded personal, educational, and economic choices. Our beneficiaries are indigent youths in remote villages and urban slums and their ill-trained, ill-equipped teachers mandated to deliver education in what we see as difficult circumstances. Most of these indigent youths who finish secondary school are inadequately prepared for university or employment. They attended third rate, ill-equipped schools; therefore, they are less competitive than their peers from rich environments. These youths continue to take exams to higher institutions and fail because they attended third rate schools so do not have any marketable skill that will enable them to secure meaningful employment or become self-employed. They and their indigent parents are frustrated because their paper qualifications do not prepare them for any job. Thus, they roam about, engaging in nefarious activities or serving as thugs during elections and ending up becoming Kidnappers when discarded by politicians after elections. Teachers, especially secondary school teachers, in rural areas are our second beneficiaries. For 20 years, Inwelle Centre has been working to fill the gap these teachers created in the education of young people in the rural areas by making available to teachers polishing to enable them become effective. Inwelle Centre is fully committed to this goal by offering access to learning for the development of their information technology skills and giving computer classes to position the teachers to be effective.

We have a breathtaking number of books in our main library at Enugu--one of the best stocked and equipped in the five south eastern states, more than 57,000 books, 7,000 magazines and journals, 2,000 educational video cassettes, CDs, DVDs, two computer networked classrooms, two reading rooms, and one big conference hall, and two seminar rooms. We also have four satellite centres each of which is equipped with 1000-3000 books and two to ten computers and mobile internet source. We solar energy source of electricity at the main centre and our satellite centre at Ogidi has solar energy source. We have been able to leverage about 7,482 young girls and boys to start earning about $30.00 a month to earning about $100.00 a month through the skills acquisition program. Some of our beneficiaries have paid their way through higher institutions and have graduated from such fields as engineering, nursing, teaching, etc. Some came back and participated in our solar panel installation projects, thereby increasing their job opportunities. These figures exclude our daily library and internet users, the participants at our symposium, community workshops, and seminars which could be estimated to be between 15,000 and 20,000. From the testimonies of the girls and other stakeholders, we are aware of the enormous success our projects have achieved by building the skills of numerous young people and enhancing education in the communities where we are located. We are experts in various fields of learning, positioned to attract other experts, and have secured a consultative status from the United Nations Economic and Social Council. We serve the people of the five states of the southeast geopolitical zone of Nigeria – Abia, 2,845,380; Anambra, 4,177,828; Ebonyi, 2,176,947; Enugu, 3,267,837; and Imo, 3,927,563 as of 2006 census.

Presently, we focus on achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals 1—5 (No poverty, Zero hunger, Good Health and Well-being, Quality Education, Gender Equality) by engaging in activities that focused on 1. Ending violence against women and girls. 2. Seeking change of attitude of the society towards girls' effort to embrace life in the science and technology field by sensitizing parents and community leaders to support girls who show interest in acquiring skills in the field of hi-tech computer. 3. Helping Youths girls acquire marketable skills that will enable them to earn money to pay for their education in the field of science and technology, and 5. Leveraging women to become visible in rural communities.

Inwelle Centre provides four innovative, strategic, life-changing projects:

1. Catch-them-young--after school tutoring, computer skills acquisition and counseling for the adolescent girls who dropped out of school and those at the risk of dropping from school

2. Academic boot camp for indigent girls transitioning from high school to higher institutions who are ill-prepared to gain admissions and possess no skill to generate income to be able to pay for the cost of higher learning

3. Mass computer skills acquisition for girls to have a reasonable means of employment other than jobs that yields below subsistence level of income

4. Annual Symposium to re-orient the girls and to create awareness in their parents and community leaders on the need for supporting girls in any field of study, especially in science and technology field and registering and presenting panels at the United Nations NGO Commission on the Status of Women Conference.

   In order to move our work to the next level, we decided to create Inwelle Centre of Excellence which will remedy the deficiencies in education and at the same time help youths break their poverty cycle, by opening the global job market to them and also build the capacity of the teachers and lecturers. Our vision is based on a two-pronged approach: 1. producing dynamic, entrepreneurial, goal oriented, inspiring and motivational youths who will be interested in working to achieve conceived goals in our Department of Youth Empowerment which will provide innovative, strategic, life-changing projects, 2. working with teachers (Department of Youth Empowerment) in three key areas, academic preparation, management and professional development, focusing on issues associated with teaching and learning. This will enable us to creatively address the current quagmire of broken educational system in which many young secondary school leavers and graduates are stagnated because they are almost illiterates. Unemployed young graduates form the cohort of our trainers. While they are teaching other youths transitioning from third rate secondary education, they are being trained in hi-tech fields to augment their usually theory based graduate education and undergoing entrepreneurial skills training. It is a win-win situation for the two sets of young people because it builds the capacity of the young adult graduates as they build the capacity of other young people. Their training will leverage them in their job hunts as it will broaden their horizon and give them global access to jobs. We will also build the capacity of the teachers by addressing their lack of adequate training and motivation to improve their level of job satisfaction and give them reason to put in their best in teaching and learning.

The program we envisage will put technology in the hands of teachers who are used to being afraid of using technology. The novelty of the training they will get will generate in them hunger to show off their skills. The visibility their training will give them will raise their aspiration and sense of pride in their work. These are lacking right now as teachers only see their work merely as meal ticket and have joined in the instant gratification syndrome that has clouded the educational system in Nigeria. Our program will also serve parents in their quest for quality education for their children. Presently, the practice is that affluent parents send their children out of Nigeria for education, not minding the fate of such children, thus causing brain drain, diversion of Nigerian revenue and exacerbation of corruption. Our Centre of excellence is one way we can ensure that the teachers are brought at par with the teaching level these parents seek outside the country.

As the first step in the bid to create Inwelle Centre of Excellence, we started a school (Inwelle International Academy of Excellence) from Nursery to Secondary. The mission of the school is to develop students who will be employable in emerging high-tech and high-growth industries, with mastery of core academic subjects -- math, science, language arts, social studies, be well-rounded, confident, productive, confident young adults with 21st century skills and a strong work ethic, collaborative learners, ethical decision makers, creative thinkers, effective communicators with leadership potential. We already have the building, but the school needs serious equipment and access to funds for teachers’ salary in order to become viable enough to self-sustain.

The school will serve as a testing ground for teachers in training on how to promote effective teaching using technology. We see this as a future source of income as schools in the area will pay to train their teachers in learning/learner-centered teaching practices.