Our Strategic Direction
Glowing Minds Initiatives is a youth-focused and youth-led social enterprise nonprofit committed to advancing employability, entrepreneurship, and leadership across Africa.
Our Vision: "An African Society where all Youths are employed and Self Reliant."
Our Mission: We are on a Mission to empower Youths with requisite knowledge and Opportunities while advocating for policies that makes them Self Reliant.
Our Mandate: To empower African youth with skills, opportunities, and inclusive platforms that enhance employability, entrepreneurship, and civic participation, while advocating youth-centered policies, advancing climate action, and promoting gender equality and social inclusion to build a resilient, self-reliant, and sustainable African society.
Our Origin Story
Glowing Minds Initiatives was established in response to interconnected social, economic, and policy challenges confronting young people in Nigeria, particularly students and recent graduates. Nigeria has one of the largest youth populations globally, yet this demographic faces persistently high unemployment and underemployment rates.
The immediate catalyst for the organization’s formation emerged in 2018, when our Founder – Shamsudeen Abdulrazak was the Student Union President at Federal University of Technology, Minna, Nigeria and nearly 1,000 indigent students at the university were forced to defer their studies due to unpaid tuition fees.
This incident exposed a critical gap in the education system: most students lacked employable or income-generating skills to sustain themselves while studying. This experience led our Founder to convene the first Students’ Leadership Technological and Agricultural Summit (SLETA), which directly evolved into the Graduate Employability Program (GEP).
On 4th October 2020, we officially started what today evolved into Glowing Minds Initiatives. We constituted the First Board in January 2022 and on the 20th of May 2022 we fully registered as a Nonprofit with the Corporate Affairs Commission.
Our Core Values
- Integrity: Adhering to the highest standards of honesty, fairness, and accountability.
- Empathy: Understanding, supporting, and actively building solutions for marginalized populations.
- Excellence: Delivering premium-quality, high-impact programmatic outcomes.
- Hard work: Tenacity and continuous strive for meaningful social change.
- Personal Development: Empowering leaders and staff to continually expand skills and capabilities.