Teachers, parents and caregivers shape a child's day-to-day life more than any single intervention could.
Where it began
I grew up as a learner with dyslexia, long before I had a word for it.
I know what it is to be misread: to have a learning difference explained through cultural, religious and moral frameworks rather than understood.That experience is where my work starts. I also know how that misreading follows a child, into adolescence, self-esteem, relationships and the choices that shape adult life.
In 2016, I turned my experience into a question: what happens to Nigerian children whose dyslexia is never recognised?
I founded One Word Africa Foundation to pursue the question.
Following that question took me from classrooms into the wider patterns that follow them: children labelled lazy or difficult, young people leaving education early, adults shut out of economic opportunity.
In the lives I encountered, again and again, the end of that road was a trajectory leading towards poor mental health. I came to see that when dyslexia goes unrecognised, the consequences reach far beyond learning. Being misread and excluded becomes a risk to mental health, and a question of rights and safeguarding.
A child who needed a simple classroom adjustment should not grow up to become a traumatised adult in a health system without the capacity to support them. I believe prevention is far cheaper, and far kinder, than repair.
What ten years taught me
For a decade, much of my work has been adapting research to the realities of Nigerian classrooms and communities, and designing programmes around community needs.
Support for young people and adults who grew up without recognition.
Film and stage play, because communities understood difference best when they could see it in lives that looked like their own.
We saw these programmes work. What we did not yet have was the empirical lens to show how, why and by how much.
Building the clinical foundation
Alongside the advocacy, I trained. Deliberately.
Training
Hospitals and aviation
Psychology intern at the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority; clinical internship at the Federal Neuropsychiatric Hospital, Aro, Abeokuta; part of my NYSC year in the Department of Psychiatry at the National Hospital, Abuja.
Education
Special educator
Served at the Comprehensive Autism and related Disabilities Education and Training Academy in Abuja.
Community
Serenity Mind Wellness
Rose from Community Wellbeing Manager to Head of Operations. Programmes from the Mindful Kids summer camp to the Evergreen Companion programme for older adults, with partners supporting low-income and disability communities.
Humanitarian
Women in IDP Camps
Psychosocial and Wellbeing Curriculum Consultant on Nurturing Growth and Strength, supported by the World Bank Youth Innovation Fund. Drawing on WHO frameworks, I designed a component accessible across literacy and language barriers, careful not to retraumatise, with an escalation protocol for anyone needing more support.
Your photo hereWorkshop moment from the IDP camps project (with consent)
Your photo hereONE Campaign or Chevening convening photo
Learning how systems work
Change at scale happens in rooms where decisions are made, so I set out to understand those rooms.
- Community engagement in the office of the Honourable Minister of Tourism, learning governance from the inside.
- ONE Campaign UK Ambassador, representing young people at international convenings and supporting the Born to Live child survival campaign.
- A youth voice within governmental and international development institutions, bringing neurodiversity to funders and officials at the Skoll World Forum and Bett.
- As a Chevening Sustainability Ambassador, working alongside engineers and farmers on disaster response, and learning how much a mental health perspective adds to problems that do not look like mental health problems at first.
Closing the evidence gap
As a Chevening Scholar, I built what my earlier work lacked.
Research skills, and the habit of critical, evidence-led thinking.
- Master's research using neuroimaging to study symptoms of ADHD.
- Selected for the African Brain Data Network Fellowship in functional near-infrared spectroscopy, building technical depth in biological research for African contexts.
- Postgraduate Ambassador for the Black Student Network, and a member of the Department of Psychology's equality, diversity and inclusion committee at Bath.
- Volunteering in Enhanced Care at Royal United Hospitals Bath NHS Foundation Trust, and through its Volunteer to Career Clinical Psychology Pathway, shadowing clinical psychologists in oncology.
Where I am going
The next decade brings these threads together.
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Evidence
Through the Africa Dyslexia Data Initiative, One Word Africa Foundation will systematically document what we have learned, because there is no policy influence without data.
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Technology
Assistive technology can reach far more learners than one-to-one support ever could.
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Systems
Helping governments and institutions make education, health and social protection more psychologically informed and inclusive, including the digital systems that increasingly shape them.
The goal has not changed since 2016. A learning difference should never become a predictor of a mental health outcome.
Let's make room, together.
Whether you are designing a programme, shaping policy or planning an event, I would be glad to hear what you are working on.