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Governments at various levels have been charged to introduce leadership programmes and courses that would expose young persons to leadership early in life, as well as close the mentorship gap in the overall interest of the country.
The founder Gracelink Foundation, Obioma Levi-Johnson Ekweghariri, who gave the charge, while speaking with journalists, at the sidelines of the 2026 Emerging Young Leaders, organised by the foundation for teenagers, in Abuja, said leadership training needs to step from the classrooms. She stated that it is also imperative to also equip the teachers with the requisite resources to groom the students.
Ekweghariri explained that the summit, which was targeted at teenagers between the ages of 13 and 18 years, with participants drawn from different secondary schools and organisations, within Abuja and environs is, an annual programme, designed to expose them to issues and STEM training as well as robotics.
She stated that the Summit with the theme” Rise, Build, and Become”, which attracted professionals from different fields of endeavour, who took turns to address the participants, would help inspire the participants on the possibilities of what they can achieve.
According to her, “Leadership needs to start from the grassroots. It needs to start from the classrooms. These kids go to school. They spend like what, 8 hours within the school. The teachers also need to be equipped. One of the things I feel the government needs to do. I believe what the government needs to do is to take leadership to the children, take you to the schools. Let there be programmes, let there be courses. Let there be things that would help them to be exposed to leadership.
“Now, someone may say one is leadership. I often tell the kids and the children that we talk to, leadership is not only being the president or being in the Senate or being even a governor in the state. Leadership goes beyond that. People can lead in different industries. We have leaders in medicine, like some of our speakers today, are leading in one area or the other. So, there are leaders in every area. So, we have to let the kids know, leadership is just influence.”
Furthermore, Ekweghariri stated that “ mentorship is really key. I would say that for me, being a woman in engineering, I wouldn’t have gone into engineering if I didn’t have mentors. So that is the gap that we have seen, even as an organization- Gracelink Foundation, it is one of the key things that we do.
“One thing is learning from your experience. Another thing is even learning from someone else’s. So you breach that gap because they already have someone else’s experience and they can learn and they don’t have to make the same mistakes. That is one of the key initiatives that we have, ensuring that kids have mentors, people that have gone ahead, people that have faced those challenges to be able to guide them so they don’t have to make the same errors that they have made.”
