Future Begins Now

The best graduating student of University of Ilorin, 2019 gave us some time to share the values that produced the excellent 4.98 CGPA result. Toluwani, first child of a family of 5 is 19 years old and the grand daughter of a professor of Mathematics. Please, introduce yourself briefly I'm Okunola Toluwani Deborah. A First Class graduate of the Department of Mathematics, University of Ilorin. Why Mathematics/Statistics? I chose to study Mathematics because I enjoyed learning mathematics and solving mathematical problems and I believed that I could start my career along that path. You have been announced to be the best graduating student of the year, what factors will you say helped you achieve this? First of all, God's help. Then, good relationships (families and friends), focus, sacrifices, discipline, diligence, good time management and consistency. You are a beautiful young lady who is also intelligent, how did you handle distractions from the op...

Personal Development Course 2019 is about to kick off and we are very excited to announce the schools that have been chosen in the coming days. We will reach 500 students this time in 20 schools in Ibadan. Our mentors are currently being selected and trained. Personal Development Course is a course organized by Future Begins Now where secondary school students are given mentors that can stir up academic excellence in them. The training takes 6 months with 12 contacts. The training was able to reach 125 students in the maiden edition in 5 schools, but is being scaled to reach 500 students. The mentors are selected from higher institutions and graduates who have inspiring stories and a heart for the younger ones and they will take the students through a carefully devised curriculum that contains self awareness, social awareness, career development, leadership skills and communication skills as modules. The modules are structured in the Forbes pattern for trainings which ...

It is no longer news that cultism has found its way into the secondary schools in Oyo state and the ugly effects have started to surface. Students who choose to stay outside of school compounds have formed a group that is referred to as Olu Igbo (king of the forest). The named is coined from where they often meet which is a bush. The students leave home like every other student, but do not enter the school premises. They hang around corners of the street of the school. They meet to take hard drugs and have sex as the group consist of boys and girls. A team member of Future Begins Now had to do an onsite investigation of this group and the day he chose to find out was an eventful day as the group from a school were at war with the same group from another school that was nearby. The only weapon he didn’t see was a gun. Every other weapon were on ground. There were rumors that they have charms too. Stories of secondary schools having clashes have been long standing, but m...

According to Newton, if you don’t apply an external force to an object, it will remain on the same spot or maintain its course. Following the trends of happenings in the secondary schools, we have found out that students do not have the pictures that inspire academic excellence before them. They are constantly faced with people who have gone the wrong way and picture education to them as not so important. That trend has produced a lot of young minds who are under-utilizing their potentials on the streets. Thuggery has become the big thing in town. Cultism is not out of the game as Olu Igbo and Itu have become well established gangs in the secondary schools. Students now have parents who are proud of being garage boys. Future Begins Now is not going to sit back and watch this trend continue. Something will be done about it and that is why we are providing a different picture for these students. We want them to see that it is still possible to become academically excellent and g...

Lamentations make the problem obvious, but it does not solve the problem. The challenge facing the education sector of Nigeria is so enormous that is will take many hands to completely solve. In September 2016, we decided to join the problem solving crew and shake the world in our own gentle way. Future Begins Now was established as a project by Christian Youth Alliance, but has metamorphosed into a social entreprise that provides mentors, guidance and financial support for thousands of secondary school students in Ibadan. With a vision to make quality education available for all, we made the students the focus of our activities and make education attractive to them again. In the last 3 years, we have reached over 4,000 students with the gospel of academic excellence, inspiring boys and girls to become great. As we drive the vision into the streets, we are also committed to building as brand of Future Begins Now in the country. Presently, we are a member of the Sustaina...

Tertiary institution is a place for advanced learning after graduating from the secondary school; they signify the next academic progress in life. Tertiary institutions offer higher degrees to individuals. Schools in this category include Universities, Polythenics and Colleges of Education. The battle to gain admission into tertiary institutions starts with writing qualifying examinations like WAEC (West African Examination Council) and UTME (Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination), For this discourse, I will focus on universities, and as an alumna of  a public university, I will take my bearing from there. Survival of the fittest comes into play here; this is so because the best courses (in terms of what people assume sells more after school) have the highest cut off marks. One lesson is learnt here, the local championship of secondary school days has to be dropped. Senior boys and girls, who have perhaps represented their schools in times past, had to buckle up so t...

Another edition of the quarterly production of the NGO that focuses on different aspect of education advocacy has been released. The edition focuses on the need for everyone to be involved in the advocacy and development of education in a cou try like Nigeria. Education serves as the foundational sector that leads to the development of all other sectors. The more we get it right with education, the more other sectors fall into their right places. The edition featured authors that have been in the educational field for decades and advocates of quality education. The magazine can be downloaded here .

When the Personal Development Course started in Kumapayi Community High School, among the 25 students selected by the teachers was a boy with a physical challenge which prevents him from walking with his legs. He crawls while in school because he doesn't have a wheel chair to move. This caught the attention of the director of the NGO and he made an appeal to the sponsors of the NGO and they were generous enough to donate a wheel chair to him. Today, Ahmed's aim of becoming a lawyer has been given a great encouragement.

While praying for children, an essential aspect adults do not like to miss is that of career and ambitions. They most of the time pray for them to be medical doctors, professors, lawyers, engineers, presidents and so on. You would rarely hear them pray for a child to become a teacher but that’s not what this article is about. You are likely to have heard an adult pray for a girl to become a first lady. That prayer is in itself not a bad one but when the ambition of a girl is to become a first lady, there’s a fundamental error somewhere. I recently overheard a girl saying she would become a first lady and I was prompted to write this. If it was someone I did not know at all, maybe I could have passed it off as a joke but with the girl in question, I saw it as a serious matter. Being a first lady in this context is a position occupied by the wife of a head of state or chief executive. That sounds more like a marriage/relationship goal than a future ambition. To have such a dream ...

Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years. The most celebrated mark of time is the beginning of a new year. However, despite the high rating of the new year celebrations, it is the seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks and months that make the year whatever it would be. Just as the future is upon us, the new year is now a reality. Whether we have thought of it or not, the actions we have taken in the little time the year began cannot be moved back to 2018, neither can they be pushed forward to the coming year. As our actions matter greatly, our inactions could equally cause a great damage or success. It is for this course that Future Begins Now wishes us all a prosperous and productive new year. We are still committted to helping the younger generation reach their potential even through our mentoring projects. 2018 was a good year for us but we hope to serve our society better this year through the means we have chosen which is reaching out to secondary school studen...