“You have brain capacity you need as an adult by age five. It is not going to increase that much in your lifetime afterwards”

I have been working since I was awarded my Master’s degree and that has been since 2002. I have a Bachelor of Science (B.Sc) in Business Economics from Leicester University, and a Master of Science (M.A) in International Business Management from New Castle University both in the United Kingdom. I have worked in many different fields: health and education, media, oil and gas and banking. I have amassed about fourteen years of professional experience and decided I wanted to do something for myself, to develop myself, in the human capital field and I didn’t see that development happening under somebody else. So, it meant I would have to come up with an idea of what to do.

I am passionate about two things: media and child care. However, child care has been a longer passion of mine than media has been. I have been interested in children since I myself was a child. At seven years old, I decided I was going to build an orphanage not because I wanted one but because I didn’t like the term ‘orphanage.’ I wanted a place where children who didn’t have parents could be at home, but I wouldn’t have called it an orphanage. I was looking for a place to make children feel loved and cared for in a way that is profitable or that makes some business sense. In the case of an orphanage it would have been non-profit.

Anyway, I decided that child care was a longer passion of mine and got qualified as a professional child care provider. I am qualified to take care of children between the ages of 0-19 year-old.

It depends on what it is we are focusing on. For instance language acquisition is a pretty much early childhood task and occurs between ages 0-5 years old, there are other early cognitive skills to be developed, surely. Put simply, you should start developing the child pretty much from birth; you already have brain capacity you would need as an adult by age five. It is not going to increase that much in your lifetime after that. So you have this brand new brain, with the ability to do so much but has not yet been trained to do anything as yet so much. You find that more and more people are focusing on early years because that is the stage at which the brain is brand new. It is brand new and ready to soak up information. Ten, fifteen years ago, we didn’t have the information that the brain was this capable, at that age, so people didn’t pay much attention to this critical window in human capital development.

I guess a better Nigeria at the end of the day. That is, if we are talking about the grander picture, then it is definitely a better Nigeria. I don’t think that if you killed everybody in power today Nigeria would be different. This is because the people who would take over, even if you literally plucked them from the streets would do exactly the same things because they have the same belief system. For Nigeria to better, the belief system has to change.

A better Nigeria would be one where a grown man does not urinate on the streets but in the bathroom. A better Nigeria is one in which a grown woman is not going to throw her orange peels out the car and onto the street because she thinks someone is going to sweep it. No, she should wait until she gets to a dustbin.

Well, rainbow because little kids like colours and there is nothing more colourful than a rainbow. Manor is a play on the words mansion and cortege. A manor is bigger than a cortege but smaller than a mansion. So we paint the picture of a place that is bigger than a cortege but smaller than a mansion, therefore a home. A colourful place you would feel comfortable coming to. A place you can be creative. A place you would enjoy coming to, a home away from home.

One challenge really is that we are brand new. So we are gradually getting our name out there. We are essentially selling our services to family and friends for now. I guess that is how most businesses start. Then with word-of-mouth advertising, we hope to gain some traction. It is easier when you’re selling a product than if you were selling education. Besides, there is really no business where you focus on the stranger more than the people you already know. You have to focus on the people you know and get them to sell you. We market to our friends and get them to market to their friends and so on. It is definitely a challenge.

I intend to grow the business, not in terms of age range but in terms of what services we have available and possibly in terms of getting a bigger space. But I intend to stick to early years. I don’t intend to go into primary or secondary education.

Now I am doing one to four (1-4) and I am doing this because we don’t really cover pre-primary education in Nigeria. I will come down lower in age until I have facilities to take care of newborns. The school’s aim is to become specialist in early years’ education. It is a niche. Only a few people understand the value of early years’ education and I believe there is need for some level of positive change here.

I would go for discipline. No matter how unintelligent you are, work hard at anything, you will figure it out. You need the discipline to keep working at it. The first doctors didn’t go to school to learn medicine. The first engineers didn’t go to school to learn engineering. They just kept struggling to figure things out until they got the solution they were looking for.

They first ‘anything’ didn’t do it because they knew what they were doing.  They were disciplined enough and never gave up. Halve the drugs we have together are here not because anyone intended to create those particular drugs. They were aiming for one thing, and then they got another. In the search of a cure for cancer for instance, they found a cure for something else and you think they would stop at that?

Parents are the child’s primary educators. We work hand in hand. Otherwise, work done would equal zero. That is how sex education came into schools. Parents expected the schools to educate the child on matters of sex but schools before now thought it was the parent’s duty. After a while there was an agreement that at a certain age, children should be taught sex education in school. Now we have sex education. It doesn’t mean that everything should be done in school; it simply means that if parents and teachers don’t agree, the child doesn’t get educated.