The Incubation Hub Story
The Need
At Teach For Nigeria, our vision is that one day all children in Nigeria will have an opportunity to attain an excellent education. A key strategy in our long-term theory of change is to channel our alumni into key sectors and positions from where they will be able to accelerate TFN’s efforts towards attaining this vision.
In the second year of the Teach for Nigeria’s fellowship program, fellows implement a “Be The Change” project — a social impact project with the goal of addressing challenges to delivering education in their placement schools and communities. Upon completion of the Fellowship programme, TFN Alumni have scaled their Be The Change projects to fully registered social enterprises and hence need support, especially in the form of entrepreneurship training and grants. The Incubation hub was borne out of this idea with the goal to support TFN alumni to continue to strive towards our vision, tackling the inequities from many sides by leading various social impact interventions focused on improving quality of life/ promoting access to education.
The Incubation Hub
The Incubation hub is a 3-month Incubation Programme that offers a unique opportunity to TFN alumni to accelerate growth for their enterprises. Through the Incubation Hub, participants will be equipped with the practical knowledge required to build and sustain their social innovations through an intensive training workshop, access to post program support, Mentoring and an opportunity to pitch for seed funding for their organisations.
The Incubation Hub is structured around Teach for Nigeria’s long-term theory of change strategy to support alumni to continue to work as social innovators and entrepreneurs leading start-up businesses or initiatives focused on proffering solutions to identified problems within the education sector. Subsequently, this program is implemented annually by Teach for Nigeria to support alumni initiatives across the nation.
Incubation Hub Impact Stories
The Incubation Hub program was launched in 2020. The pioneer cohort comprises 20 initiatives based in Northern Nigeria, focused on promoting access to education and improving quality of life for children in low income communities.
The second cohort comprises 10 initiates drawn from different parts of Nigeria.
Since inception, 30 enterprises have been supported. Incubation Hub has disbursed 4M seed fund in scaling alumni-led initiatives impacting 500+ teachers and 2000+ learners.
- 30 initiatives incubated
- 4M in seed funding
- 500+ teachers impacted
- 2000+ children reached
For us at Bookaclan, the Incubation Hub couldn’t have come at a better time; we were at that stage where we needed all of the resources we could get to help us build the structure that we needed as an organization and the training segment of the program provided just that.
We emerged one of the winners of the pitch competition and that provided us funds to scale up our project. We established a literacy hub in another local government in Kaduna state and after that, we’ve gone ahead to secure over $7,000 in additional funding, which we have used to establish other projects in the state; so for us, the Incubation Hub has been an amazing experience.
Samuel Chinonso Onyeledo
Founder, Bookaclan Literacy Hub
Going through all of the phases at the Incubation Hub from the onboarding to the different learning sessions, to creating my pitch deck to actually pitching itself was a learning process for me. It availed me with different skills which I’ve been able to use in ensuring the success of the Empower Me Initiative.
Incubation Hub provided me with a platform to network with other amazing individuals and grow skills. I’ve been able to set ambitious goals for the initiative and accessed various grant opportunities upto USD3800 and impacted 180+ children in the last 2 years
Ijadunola Oluwatosin Elizabeth
Founder, Empower Me
