What I’d Tell You is a Kryvent series featuring experienced leaders across the social impact ecosystem. In each conversation, we ask them to look back on what they’ve built and what they’ve learned from occupying different roles within the sector. The aim is to pass something useful forward to the next generation of nonprofit and social enterprise founders building across Africa.

Our guest today is an educator, social entrepreneur, and development practitioner whose work spans education, youth development, and international development. His journey began in 2012, when he started an after-school programme to support children who were unable to access formal education. What began as a volunteer initiative grew into a career focused on improving education systems, developing young leaders, and building organisations that drive social change.

Can we meet you?

My name is Erioluwa Adeyinka, and I am a young person, so I understand the struggles of living. I live in Lagos, Nigeria. I started my career in education because I experienced education injustice. Growing up, there were so many young people and children my age who were not going to school. I began to volunteer and created an after-school program. I taught children who were not in school the things I was learning in school each morning. It grew very fast, and we even had volunteer parents.

This was my first exposure to managing volunteers and managing projects, as far back as 2012, about 14 years ago. I became interested in it, then went to school and studied science and education because I really love both. That propelled me into higher-level curriculum design with government, with public and private institutions, and into understanding how the world works around education, including international education. Over the last ten years, I have worked professionally in education, international development and youth development.

My career has revolved around those areas. I have done programs management, mostly programs, plus fundraising, operations, community organizing and management, and communications. I have pretty much done a lot in those fields, and I am very grateful to God for it. I currently work as a program director at Peace First, a grant-giving organization that supports young people to implement their ideas. Before Peace First, there was a passion project I have built over the years, The Well Teachers Foundation. We support teachers, and right now we operate like a foundation, with grants and funding for teachers, a retirement support fund, and incentives for teachers in training. We hope that at some point we will have enough capital to support schools with funding and grants. I also run a social enterprise called TEACcH, a co-creation hub that supports businesses and nonprofits to become agile, profitable and efficient.

Which came first, and how did each begin?

The Well Teachers Foundation came first. I started the initiative in 2019, and it was not called that then. It was the 21st Century Teachers Program, a nonprofit, and we are still registered as a company limited by guarantee, designed to support teacher development and educational advancement in Nigeria.

As I continued on that journey, I became interested in social entrepreneurship. I began to understand that education is only as effective as the readiness of the people it sends out to the nation. Our teachers were trying their best to prepare young people for a world that does not exist. So I thought, what if I work with business people and small businesses in Africa?

Unemployment kept increasing and people kept going to school. Many businesses will tell you that young people are not employable, and small business owners especially will say they cannot employ them. So I knew there was a problem between what was happening in the education system and what was happening in the marketplace.

I thought, why don’t I create a co-creation hub? The idea is to work with small businesses so they have better structures, to understand their needs, and to let that inform how we prepare young people, in educational institutions or through other learning processes, to work with small businesses. When we checked the curriculum of many universities, they did not prepare you for that. They prepare people to work in white-collar firms or large corporations that do not exist. Right now, from what I understand, about sixty percent of Africa’s workforce works in small businesses, and they just learn things along the way. Nobody teaches you how to work in a business of five people. They teach you how to be an accountant in a big, big company.

So the nonprofit came first for me. In 2022, I got the inspiration to start the business, but I did not start until 2024 because it was a journey. I needed the initial capital, and I needed to understand what I was doing. We are still at it. We are grinding. TEACcH is a private limited liability company and a social enterprise. Seventy percent of our clients are nonprofits, and we value inclusion and youth development in our culture and our programs.

What does the day to day look like at The Well Teachers Foundation?

When we started as the 21st Century Teachers Program, we set out to train and equip teachers with 21st century skills. Our needs assessment at the time showed that only one in five teachers, across private and public schools, had gone through any form of training in five years. Even in public schools, those who had were mostly doing it because they needed the training for their promotional exams. Private schools did not have any form of training. So we did a lot of training.

Then we realized very quickly that there were no instructional materials or financial resources to act on what we were teaching. Teachers were grossly underpaid and had little or no material to work with. We had to change our strategy. Instead of training, training, training with little or no resources, we asked, how about we use the little resources we have to improve access and improve resources?

So we switched our model and started providing things. It began with internet for schools and libraries, because we were teaching educational technology and realized that many schools had no computers, no internet, not even a projector. We started providing those rather than doing training alone.

Every year on International Teachers Day, October 5th, we give teachers’ grants. We have a lifetime award for retired teachers, where we go to their houses to say thank you and give them a grant. We also started encouraging student teachers, who are still in training. There is a lot of discouragement around education, and the government gives them no remuneration for their teaching practice. So we create activities tailored for them and give grants to those who led change-making efforts or made a serious impact during their teaching practice. We have done that year in, year out for about three years. Other teachers also receive change-making grants, with different categories for hard-working teachers.

But our major programming, and what our day-in, day-out looks like, is this. We partner with organizations to deliver training, because we have a curriculum, and other nonprofits that train are using it. So we keep updating that curriculum, working on it and doing research. We also run our awards and grant-giving programs at different points, and our major program cycle is always around International Teachers Day.

We do partnerships as well. Last year, we partnered with the Internet Society and deployed internet to government schools across Lagos. It was not just infrastructure. We provided free internet for a whole year through the partnership, and even after it ended, we are still paying for the internet subscription as an organization. That is what our daily and monthly activities look like.

You have mentioned The Well Teachers Foundation offering training. What kind of funding have you explored at the foundation, and which came first?

Our funding has been a mix of grants and earned income. We have applied for and won grants of different sizes. We have also sold products. I mentioned that we designed a curriculum. We trained private schools and used the money generated to train public school teachers. An ed tech company approached us some time ago because they wanted to develop an ed tech product for teachers. We shared the curriculum with them and were paid for consulting, and while they use the curriculum, we get a percentage of the money.

We have explored different ways of generating revenue. I would say our mix of grants and income is about 50-50. I think we have won more grants than we have generated revenue, in terms of volume. But in our first two years of operations, we did not win grants. It was the revenue we generated that we used to run programs and cover overhead.

Let us talk about earned income. What was the reality of selling in the early years as a nonprofit? What challenges did you run into?

When we started our programs, we were offering training, and it did not sit well with some people that a nonprofit was asking teachers to come and be trained at a fee. At the time, people were not familiar with paying for a training that a nonprofit was offering. So we understood the market quickly. We understood that maybe our customer is not our beneficiary, and I think some nonprofits do not understand that at the start. It is not straightforward like a business, where there is a product, a price and customers.

I knew quickly that I had a product on my hands, but I had to study business models and pick the one that best suited my organisation, to determine who is willing to pay for what we can do. I remember in the early days thinking, can I design a training curriculum that a high-end private school would be interested in for their teachers but has not had the time to do? We train their teachers and get paid the agreed fees. I take that sum to organize free training for low-income teachers who cannot afford our training. It was easy to speak with school owners and PTAs (Parent Teacher Associations). Even when they tried to negotiate the fee, we told them that the proceeds go towards training teachers in public schools. We train 20 in your school, but you make it possible for us to train 70 elsewhere. They did not mind paying. They considered it a form of CSR. So I identified who my customers and beneficiaries were.

Second, you have to understand what people are willing to pay for and their psychology around money. Most times we are tempted to design products we believe are cool, and how we design them can be limiting. When you do a needs assessment and come up with your concept note, you write a lot, including jargon that makes sense to a data or development professional. That is not how you sell or communicate it. People have to need it or find it desirable.

I remember when we wanted to start offering training for teachers, ten modules. We did not say, this is for capacity building as a teacher. We branded it as: you want to earn more as a teacher, so you need to build these skills. At the time, there was a shortage of teachers in the UK and the UAE, schools were looking, and many teachers knew they did not have the skill set for the opportunities available or to increase their earnings. Many did not leave for the UK or the UAE after the training, but they became better after it, which is our goal. Some of them did travel. So if you are a nonprofit founder building a product, you have to be realistic and understand why people would want to buy. If you have a product no one is willing to pay for, you do not have a product, you have a nice idea. Every product must have willing customers. Talk to them to get a feel for what they are willing to pay for. Sometimes what people are willing to pay for is not what you think.

Can you embed the thing you are really passionate about in the part people are willing to pay for? In our training, for example, it was capacity building, but we had modules on consent, sex education, inclusive education and supporting children with learning disabilities. If I had said, come and pay to learn how to support children with learning disabilities, not many would have paid. In Nigeria at the time, teachers did not think it was urgent to learn about. But we embedded it in the training curriculum alongside the skills considered pressing. That is how I approach many other things we have done.

I remember when a technology company that was building an LMS for schools approached us. They needed teachers to test it. We asked if they would like us to connect them to 1,000 real teachers who could test it and give feedback, instead of marketing that might not reach the right audience effectively. They said okay. We deployed our trainers and facilitators to as many schools as we had on our plan, to train teachers in groups of 100 who would test the product and tell us whether it worked for them. My customer was the tech company, which wanted 1,000 teachers to test its product. My beneficiaries were the teachers who benefited from the training and resources.

You have spoken about products and how to sell them. But some products are bought seasonally and may struggle with recurring purchases, so earned income is not a magic wand. How should an organisation begin to think about financial sustainability?

Let me start by saying that I personally do not believe every nonprofit can monetize or earn from its products or services. Even for those who can, if you have a seasonal product like training, your program and overhead should take that into account. I do not know that many organizations just starting out run all year long. If you have identified the peak period when your programs run, you do not need year-round staffing on your payroll. Are we doing contract employment for that period? For our software and other expenses, do we need a yearly subscription, or do we pay only for the period we need it? You should think about these things.

For example, we do our training in August, when teachers and schools are on long holidays. They are tired in July after a long academic year, so we train in August, before schools resume in September. By September, we roll out applications and ads and start looking for awardees for the ceremony. October is the awards ceremony. In November, we hold volunteer training and work on our impact report. In December, we close for the year. That means we only run for four months of the year, and we do not need staffing from January to August. At most, I start recruitment in June. In the low-peak seasons, at most we work with willing interns or volunteers, if we are scouting for new schools then. Do not incur overhead costs that you do not necessarily need.

Secondly, in determining the pricing of your product, factor in the cost of when it is not in season, so that when sales are low, there is still some sum to run important costs. Do not be delusional about your pricing. Also, have a budget. What is your organisation’s budget for the year? What percentage do you want to get from earned revenue? How many units are you selling, and how can you make your target sum from the product at hand? Those factors give you your numbers so you can run all year.

This is how I approach it. I look at our programming and overhead budget for the year and backtrack. That informs the increase or decrease in the price of our services and products, how much ends up in our partnership tiers, and what figure we ask from donors. If I asked a donor to sponsor a teacher last year for 10 thousand, it can be 15 thousand this year because of the cost factor and the distance we may be going this year, say to another city. There is a lot more I can say about numbers, but it would be more efficient in a training than in an interview.

Has there been any financial mistake you made in your pricing or planning assumptions for the year?

Yes, many times. I remember two in particular, and there is one more thing I would like to share.

The first was a project where we had done the budget and secured a partnership. Then the new government in Nigeria at the time announced the removal of the fuel subsidy, and we were going a long distance. The cost of transportation quadrupled. We had a timeline for the project. It was a problem. I went back and forth with the organization, explaining that it was a government policy beyond our control and forecast. We had only forecast a 10% increase to the budget, but this was way more than that. They responded that they had also planned their budget, closed it and given the money out, and the project needed to be done.

We were already in the middle of the project. I felt very pressured, and we did not want to disappoint our beneficiaries. To lose their trust is a huge cost. They are in associations, the National Union of Teachers, other unions, and district groups. If word should spread, that would have been a huge blow. We had to get creative. We met the teachers and told them the situation, in light of our earlier plans on the number of days and times the training would run. We still wanted to deliver. The teachers contributed money, one of them gave a bus, people donated things and offered us discounts, and some offered to cover refreshments. At the end of the day, we would have incurred a 90% increase in the budget, but with the teachers pitching in, the bus and the discounts, we only had to cover about 25%.

The second instance was when I hired a couple of people to help with social media and other functions for a season, to run a specific revenue-generating activity. Sadly, they did not deliver on the outcome. The economy at the time was not great for businesses either. We had to pay as agreed in the contract, even though we had hoped to get that money from the activity itself. It was not commission-based work, so we had to pay as promised. We paid everyone and experienced a serious loss. We did not have any grants or other funding to keep running, and the activity needed to keep running for those who had paid.

There was also the time we paused operations for two years because there was no revenue. The period after Covid was tough for us at the foundation. During Covid-19, we made revenue because parents were looking to engage their children and teachers needed to be equipped to use Google Classroom and other tech tools to administer learning.

For the two years after Covid-19, we moved operations from 100% to 20%. We were only applying to speak at conferences and remaining visible. We were not running any programs, and we were clear about that, but we said this is what we would like to run. So things get tough. Business is tough. I even had to bootstrap TEACcH, my business, for a while.

What happens when an organisation has a product people are willing to buy but might not break even, or has multiple products, as you did? How do they decide which to kill and which to keep?

I always look at it as input, output and potential. Profit takes the lowest form of input and has the maximum output. For example, our curriculum. We have built it, and we just update it periodically. It does not require heavy programming, whereas training requires heavy programming, and it is onsite. If you have five products on your hands, look at which one requires the lowest input. It could be a one-time thing that can yield serious output going forward. It may be cost-intensive at the beginning, but can you recoup the money in the long run?

Some products you will sell as an organization will barely break even, but you have the potential to make a lot of money from them in the future. If you have insight or data to back that up, keep at it, but try to keep your operational costs lower. Many apps we use today, like Facebook and Uber, were not making profit when they started. They knew there was potential based on the adoption rate. The indicator might be that many people are interested in the thing when you put out an interest form. Say 1,000 people fill the form and 100 pay. That means there is interest. You have to ask yourself how you can still serve this interest. Is it because my pricing is too high? Is it the timing? People put on training at different times of the year for different reasons. I put ours during salary week. There are certain trainings you put at the time of year when people have just written their new year resolutions. That is when you run marketing, in the first two months of the year. In the middle of the year, anything can happen and people are burnt out. Vacation is always marketed in the middle of the year.

You have to understand seasons in relation to your product. Also, sit down with the data. You will know which one needs to go. Sometimes the one you have the strongest attachment to is not what the market desires. Sometimes you do not have to kill a product or idea. Just withdraw it so it can sit in research and development until you have the resources to push it. Nobody may be willing to pay for it, and you do not have the money to float it because you do not have a trust fund. You can apply for a seed grant to test ideas like that. If you want to make money, focus on the one that works. Double down on it, and on the one that has the potential to rise. It is the market that determines, and the market is not sentimental or emotional about what it wants. The customer is king.

You have won grants, and you work in a grantmaking organisation. What advice would you give to those looking to win grants, whether at the seed stage or at growth?

Peace First awards grants to organisations, and it is not just seed grants. We have four categories. Soil grants go to communities and groups of people, because you plant your seed in the soil. Seed grants go to young people with an idea. Development grants go to individuals who are already doing something and need to develop capacity. Then there is the growth grant, to grow or scale something that exists. These grants differ in size.

The seed grant, for example, can start as low as 250 dollars and other categories go as high as 10,000 or 15,000 dollars, depending on the grant size. It is quite flexible. To some funders, all of this is still a seed grant. But given the state of the sector and the countries we work in, it is a lot of money for young people who are building. Imagine 15 million naira for a young person building in Nigeria.

If you want to win a grant, know that grant applications are tough. Peace First, for example, tries to make it easy. They selected some recent awardees through social media, in the comment section. That means you have to have a digital footprint or a social media person. They trusted the social credibility people had for them to be mentioned.

Right now, it is a game of numbers. Grants have dropped because of the USAID cuts, global wars and the economy. Countries are focusing on their home and allied countries. Countries and foundations that would previously fund youth-led organizations around the world are saying, there is a war in my country, and I would rather spend the money at home or cushion the effect of the wars on my country. So there is a reduction in the pie, the pool of grants we have at the moment. Increase the number you apply for. Build relationships and rapport. Send your work to as many funders as you can and introduce yourself.

There is something I learnt in my fundraising days at Youth X Youth. If you tell an organisation what you are doing and they say, sorry, we do not fund this type of organisation, or not at this time, I ask them two questions. Is there anyone in your network you feel I should be speaking to, or who can point me in the right direction? And is there anything I can do better to position myself? Do not just take no for an answer. Let them point you in the direction you should be looking. See if you continue to get feedback. Money will flow towards your organization eventually. Money flows, it is currency. But yes, fundraising is hard, tough, a game of numbers, a full-time job.

It is difficult to be a nonprofit founder doing programs, operations and fundraising yourself. These are things people have a 9-to-5 for, do all their lives, 60 hours a week, and still do not meet their targets. So give yourself some grace if you are making some progress. Fundraising is tough even for a well-resourced organisation with staff who can travel to speak with funders. You probably do not have that leeway. When I was actively fundraising, I travelled and met people for about two years.

On the funder’s side, I do not review applications. I design programs to avoid conflict of interest, and the way our system works at Peace First, the selection of grants is something I am not part of. I would say try, keep documenting your stories, including on social media, and show up. Do not be shy. Your organization cannot be broke while you are shy.

For our last question, there is different advice on how people should build their impact ideas today. Some say build a nonprofit but mix your funding. Some say build a social enterprise. Others say build a nonprofit and a separate business arm. You have tried two of these three options. What would you tell someone looking ahead at the sector going into 2027?

I have seen people lose both the organization and the business. It is crazy out there. I do not think every organization should be thinking about making money, but sadly it is the growing advice in the situation we find ourselves in. Some nonprofit founders have no business building a business. Someone with no idea or passion for building a business will start, hate the job, and find they are no longer doing what they intended and know how to do best.

My advice is to do the one that lets you sleep well at night. For example, you care about the climate, but you are being forced to start a business that you cannot handle and cannot get a co-founder for. I do not advise it. Nothing is worth your inner peace.

The waters will always be muddy. I have been in this sector for a decade or more. Since I got into it in 2012, I have been hearing people say there is no funding and we need to start exploring other sources of income. At some point in that season, the tides changed. Some funders came in and some left.

If you run into business, there are economic realities, regulation and taxes. Even business owners do not have peace of mind. I do not know why, as nonprofit builders, we think we will have peace of mind because we are doing good. Are business people doing bad? Overall, do the one that gives you peace.

Many thanks to Erioluwa Adeyinka for this candid conversation.

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