At a Lagos event organised by Business Matters Incubators (BMI), a cross-section of established children entrepreneurs mentored their peers and shared business lessons. The BMI Catch Them Young (CTY) event aimed to groom the entrepreneurial spirit in kids and teens to prepare them for the future. At the event, the organisers also advocated for including entrepreneurship in Nigerian primary and secondary school curricula.
It was well attended as it witnessed a gathering of students from various schools, kid entrepreneurs, and notable men and women such as Nnamdi Ezeigbo (the CEO of SLOT Systems Limited ), Taiwo Timothy, the Deputy Vice-Chancellor, the Federal University of Technology Akure and Henrietta Onwuegbuzie, an associate professor at Lagos Business School. One of the teen entrepreneurs, Sapphire Ekeng, a 14-year-old actress who also owns a skincare brand called Sapphire Skincare, spoke about her brand and the role her mother played. She said: “The idea came to me during the year of Covid which was 2020.
For me, I would say Covid either broke you or made you. It made me because I usually do acting, but I wasn’t called for acting jobs that period because of the lockdown, so I was thinking of another way to make money. “First, I thought of pillows because I love pillows; they are comfy.
When I told my mom about it, we did a few marketing surveys and saw that it wouldn’t be so successful. Then I remembered that I always receive compliments for my skin, that it look.
