A Project in Nigeria led by our Ambassador Temitayo Olatunde:
From Nearly Dropping Out to Fighting for Every Child’s Education
In communities across Nigeria, millions of children begin each school day already at a disadvantage. Classrooms lack basic infrastructure. Textbooks are scarce. And when the sun sets, the absence of reliable electricity extinguishes any remaining opportunity to study, revise, or prepare for the next day. For these children, the barriers to education are not just institutional. They are physical, economic, and deeply entrenched.
Temitayo Olatunde knows this reality not from research, but from experience. Growing up in a low-income household in Nigeria, he attended secondary school in a classroom without a proper roof or window fittings. When it rained, lessons were suspended. When darkness fell, studying at home was rarely possible. These were not isolated inconveniences. They were the everyday reality for children in communities like his, and they remain so for millions across Nigeria today.
The barriers did not stop at the school gate. When Temitayo reached university, financial hardship followed him there too. Unable to meet the cost of tuition, he was forced to take a leave of absence, his academic future uncertain, his path forward unclear. “That period was one of the hardest of my life,” he recalls. “I had the grades. I had the drive. But none of that matters when you simply do not have the money to stay.” It was his community that refused to let him fall. Friends and those who believed in him came together and crowdfunded his tuition fees, making it possible for him to return and complete his degree. “I remember thinking if my people had not shown up for me, that would have been it. And I knew there were thousands of others whose stories were ending every day, with nobody showing up for them.” That act of collective solidarity left a permanent mark, not only as a personal memory, but as a lesson in what becomes possible when communities refuse to abandon one of their own.
It is a lesson that now sits at the heart of everything he does. Through the Temvert Empowerment Foundation, Temitayo leads community-based interventions that address the structural barriers standing between children and consistent, quality learning. More than 5,000 educational materials have been distributed to children in underserved communities, providing textbooks and resources that many schools and families simply cannot afford. Dedicated scholarship has also supported out-of-school children in returning to education, recognising that sustained presence and continuity are what transform access into genuine achievement.
Central to his approach is a connection that development programmes too often overlook: the relationship between energy and education. Without reliable electricity, schools cannot function effectively and students who return home to unlit households find that the school day ends long before they are ready to stop learning. Temitayo has made solar energy access for schools a defining strand of his advocacy, working to ensure that the quality of a child’s education is not determined by whether the grid happens to be working. “A school without light is a school with a ceiling,” he says. “If a child cannot see the board in the afternoon or read at night, we are setting them up to fall behind before they even begin.”
His work equally reflects the understanding that education does not exist in isolation. Children whose families lack economic stability are far less likely to remain in school regardless of how many resources are provided, a reality Temitayo lived firsthand. He has also drawn a direct line between period poverty and education, recognising that for many girls, the absence of sanitary products is itself a reason they miss school, fall behind, or drop out entirely. The Foundation is addressing this by distributing up to 10,000 sanitary pads to school girls across underserved communities. Alongside this, skills development and financial inclusion programmes for young people and women create the economic conditions in which education can take root and last.
The Sustainable Development Goals are unambiguous: quality education, gender equality, affordable clean energy, and the reduction of inequalities are not separate ambitions. They are interdependent. What Temitayo Olatunde and the Temvert Empowerment Foundation demonstrate, community by community, is that this interdependence is not merely a matter of policy. It is a lived experience. In the child who can now read by solar light, in the girl who no longer misses school each month, in the young person who has acquired a skill and with it a measure of economic dignity, the promise of the 2030 Agenda finds tangible expression. Progress at this scale begins not in conference halls, but in the decision of one person to turn personal hardship into collective purpose.