The Nigerian Observer’s Bill Okonedo recently interviewed David Dosu (a particle physics master’s student in Europe) and Destiny Ogedegbe (a Harvard-trained New York attorney), co-founders of Idalia Africa, on their inspiring efforts to elevate Africa’s role in global innovation and education through impactful virtual lectures and sending students abroad for internships and ambitious partnerships. They share their vision and plans for the future.
Excerpts:
Q:Tell us about Idalia Africa
A: We’re a nonprofit, and our primary objective is to exponentially increase the modal contribution from Africa to the world’s innovation output. And to do this, we’d be serving as a function that starts other functions. This, from a fluffy-free perspective, would mean we’re in the business of finding, training, equipping, and accelerating people that people want.
Q: What’s the nature of your virtual lecture series?
A: The virtual lecture series held sometime last year in September and along with facilitating Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya’s first tour of CERN’s CMS experiment, we also featured lectures from Professors David Spergel (President of Simons Foundations), Cora Dvorkin (a top cosmologist at Harvard), NASA’s Hakeem Oluseyi, UC Berkeley particle physicist— Heather Gray, and UI Chicago’s Thomas A. Searles. This lecture series had thousands of participants from across 74 institutions across these African countries. It also paved the ground for us to facilitate a collaboration between the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Ghana, and CERN. We’ll be doing same for several more African higher institutions in the coming months.
Another project that spun off the lecture series is to embed the finest professors and researchers in the world into clusters of institutions across Africa. This, we hope, will not just drastically raise the ambition of our students, but also provide a benchmark for what teaching standards should be for the continent’s academics. OpenAI is on our radar, too. So is striking a partnership with NASA, Tesla, and SpaceX.
Q: Tell us about your partnership with the Simon’s Foundation.
A: What we’re reaching for with Simons foundations is less of a partnership and more of a backing. To have their stamp of support will help reduce possible friction we might otherwise encounter in the process of onboarding academic institutions across the world. Suffice it to say that none of these would remotely have been possible without the support of the foundation. Professors David Spergel, Yuri Tschinkel, and Gregory Gabadadze have been super-helpful in all of these. We raised the money that sent two students from Ghana to CERN (Switzerland), through the foundation. And have gotten a pledge to do the same for several more African students in the coming years.
Q: How does your internship work and what are the outcomes?
A: The students are working on cutting edge researches. Prince Dirisu’s work analyses data from the CMS and TOTEM detectors to find out possible glueball particle and Janet Sarfo’s focuses on top quack decay. Last we heard, they’re shuffling between countries in Europe. That’s a lot of fun, I guess. What’s that quote on work and play again?
Q: How long has Idalia Africa been operating?
A: Idalia is a relatively recent non-profit. We’ve been in operation for about a year now.
Q: What are the nature and outcomes of your previous projects in Edo State?
A: Part of Idalia’s mission in the short-to-medium term is to infiltrate as many African societies as possible. There’s a lot of upside potential that comes with the spread of intellectualism, as well as the provision of benefits tied to the exploration of intellectual capabilities for innovation. There have not been any projects specific to Edo State but that’s only because our value proposition is not limited to specific states, classes or groups of people. In fact, our focus now is not to focus on specific demographics but to democratise innovation by promoting science in Africa as a whole. This is the only way we can achieve our intended sophistications.
However, we’re super confident that very soon, there will be beneficiaries across Nigeria, including from Edo State. The multiplier effect of what we’re doing today is borderless and if, hopefully, this pans out as well as I think, then we’re all about to witness a massive paradigm shift that will take root in virtually all parts of Nigeria.
Q: Is there any other matter you like to appraise us of?
A: Yes. I haven’t in fact mentioned this to Destiny yet; but just two weeks ago, I dropped out of my master’s program here in Germany to go build a second startup; edesah, in Nigeria. Now, while the base ideals of Idalia Africa and edesah exactly remains the same, edesah goes one step further; and in a capitalistically-axiomed manner, to achieve it at scale.
Idalia Africa, is for instance constrained to the hard sciences for now and we’ll at best be selecting 50 students to go abroad per year. But with edesah, we’d be doing this in multiples of thousands.
And I believe this to be good because far much more important than the emblem of scholarship I’d be getting should I conclude my masters in Europe, is a belief I have; that people are fundamentally good; and that a litmus test for superior intellects would be to curate the parameters that keeps them so.
There was in the last five years, for instance, a radical but negative shift in what’s considered bad for parents and wards alike across Africa, this shift in moral was driven by the return on attention investment into “negative” endeavors like fraud. And in case it’s not clear already, I do not fault the people who do these things. I think it was Emma Goldman in her book, Anarchism, that said: “Ask for work. If they don’t give you work, ask for bread. And if they don’t give you bread. Take it.” I like to think that people aren’t built to chicken off of good work if the return on attention investment are ostensibly incentivised.
Tech and Zuckerberg’s coming to Nigeria has shown us that this is in close standard deviation with reason. So, I think it’s important to try for it.
But we cannot code our way out of third world problems. And so, by fixing the sciences, we would be fixing Africa’s currently non-existent innovation output, which would fix overall quality of life and ultimately, if lucky, talent retention.
