by Mubarak Aminu
As a Northerner when you travel to the Southern part of Nigeria, the way people view the region is totally different from the way you think, people there think the north is totally on rampage with insurgency and religious conflicts which causes economic instability in the region.
The title of this article as it is will take you through the journey of looking beyond the issues of insecurity and looking at the economic opportunities in the region, and how individuals have and are achieving success in spite of the challenges.
Northern Nigeria owing to it population and size, has so many problems which entrepreneurs see as an opportunity to solve and create value and wealth in the process. Even though the insecurity is taking its tolls in the Northeast, this has not stopped other parts of the country from feeling the heat of the crises.
Generally, the opportunities here are huge, ranging from lack of use of technology to improve the way of life, low quality of education and lack of media houses that bring the view of the people to the forefront on current happenings in the region. In the mix of the happenings, Liberty radio and television is set up to bring fresh view of northern people to the forefront. The market is there for anyone that wishes to look beyond the obstacle of insecurity and get to work. AREWA24 is one of such media outlet which also started operations in Kano in spite of all the insecurities challenges
The technology scene is not left behind as huge success has been recorded with Nhub organizing the first ever hackathon in the region in the heart of Plateau state, Jos to be precise. There young and innovative minds came together, used technology in 48 hours to come up with solution to a social problem in our society. Nhub stated in 2015 despite all the insecurity problems and general election issues during that time; they are currently preparing for the second edition of this event with a conference tacked to it, where technology industry players will converge and discuss on the internet of a thing and how ready Nigeria is.
In all of this, the students are not left behind as they have taken the bold step in seeing that they are part of the change we desire to see in our community, with student organizations like Enactus and Aiesec taking the challenges and solving social problems in the immediate communities. It was during the heat of insurgency that the Enactus Kaduna Polytechnic team won the national competition and had the chance to represent Nigeria at the Enactus world cup in Mexico where they came third. This year, they won the national competition with a project they executed in one of the IDP camps in Maiduguri, the Borno state capital and also represented Nigeria at the Enactus world cup where they came fourth.
The women are also coming up in terms of heading leadership positions which was not their place before in the region. This is as a result of the awareness and campaign been done by different NGO that advocate for women’s equal right. Even though women and children are the most affected by the insecurity, this does not discourage them from creating the change home they want to see in the feature.
As peace is gradually coming back to our beloved region, one must realize that more and more opportunities are yet to be explored and it is wise if we all look inward and use our available resources to solve our problems and stop looking for outsiders that will solve it for us. We all have the potentials in us, we just need to start somewhere and go from there, the talents are available, figuring out the right way to put them to effective use is what we need to find out now, some of the opportunities yet to be tapped include agricultural products storage and processing, education, access large consumer market, low access to information through the media outlet and the print media is not reaching the local masses, all this are some of the opportunities waiting to explore as you can imagine every blessed day the is at least two to three market day holding in our rural communities .
As I draw this piece of article to an end, it is very important for us to realize that no matter the situation we find our self, we should always try and see the positive side of it and make good use of it to the best of our ability, it is my believe that we will all rise to the occasion and summon the courage to face the problem in our society and turn them into opportunity as we have to see the way other have done it and are still doing it, likewise we can do ourselves.
Mubarak Aminu is passionate about anything that has to with technology and using it to solve societal problems. He blogs at www.techarewa.com.
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