Ebunoluwa Akinola
Eyitayo Ogunmola is the CEO and Founder of Utiva, a technology education company that helps students and recent graduates in Sub-Saharan Africa to develop the right skills and knowledge to succeed in the global job market.
Eyitayo is one of the Global Good Fund’s 2019 Fellows in recognition of his pioneering work to improve employment rates for young people by developing their technology and leadership skills.
His entrepreneurialism was sparked by his own experience after he graduated from the University of Ilorin, he was frustrated by how hard it was to find a good job, struggled for two years but got lucky meeting a mentor who helped him into consultancy which kickstarted his career.
He realised many other young people were experiencing similar blocks to progress as he had, and he wanted to find a solution. So he set up Utiva in 2015 championing a new model to address the skills-gap problem, Utiva combined an online platform, and traditional face-to-face classes delivered within universities, to develop job-ready graduates.
Now he works with local and global businesses to identify the skills they need. To date, over 12,000 graduates have benefitted from Utiva and they currently work with 25 universities across Nigeria.
With a clear focus on the future, he is pushing Utiva to make an impact by helping organisations to digitalise their workforce, championing conversations around data science, machine learning and AI.
Dovenet Nigeria recently partnered with Utiva to launch a 2-day boot camp to help women get into tech. Also, Binance Africa, the largest blockchain also partnered with Utiva to host a blockchain bootcamp to educate women that will love to learn blockchain.
Utiva’s forward thinking has led the Nigerian government to seek its support for policy development and programme interventions.
