Alumni Profile: Edem Ossai, MAIDP'19

Edem Ossai, founder and executive director of Mentoring Assistance for Youth and Entrepreneurship Initiative (MAYEIN), is an advocate for equal opportunity education rights in her home country, Nigeria. She prioritizes practical civic education and youth political inclusion, especially pertaining to how democratic governments should operate. Ossai, who has a BL in law from Obafemi Awolowo University and an MA in Cultural and media studies from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, views the youth of the African Continent as vital for the development of African governments’ futures.

Ossai founded MAYEIN in 2012 to facilitate her mission of educating and empowering Nigerian youth. “After running a reading program for children in the evenings, I slowly started to witness the increasing number of kids that were not enrolled in school, especially in my state. There were more and more children on the streets hawking and begging. It’s an issue that has serious security implications. So, I started the organization to start working on issues like girls enrollment and access to public education.”

MAYEIN’s work has led to significant progress in the encouragement of youth skills development, civic participation, and economic inclusion for Nigerian youth. One of Ossai’s original initiatives engaged children through a mobile library, which she started in 2016. The library provides learning resources such as books, information and communication technology (ICT) tools, and mentoring opportunities to children from rural areas who otherwise lack access to these resources. The program has engaged over 2,000 participants to date.

Ossai completed the Master of Arts in International Development Policy (MAIDP) in 2019. "I came in wanting to learn about methods and challenges of public policy as an agent for social transformation. I wanted to learn how governments design policies and how they are able to impact large populations. Before coming to Harris, I had the mindset of an activist, and so I was not always considering limitations in available resources and other stakeholders’ interests in policy design. Harris helped me navigate that understanding.”

Having completed the MAIDP, Ossai has returned to Nigeria and is continuing to run MAYEIN. She says that her Harris experience is informing her work now in more ways than she could have anticipated. “Several courses I took at Harris expanded my understanding of certain topics. For example, I took a course on early childhood development which has helped me understand cognitive aspects of children as they grow up. I also took an impact evaluation course, so now we are able to more precisely measure our impact. And I do a lot of qualitative work through surveying and focus groups, both of which Harris taught me more about as well.”

Finally, Ossai says that Harris convinced her of the importance of experimenting with new educational models. “We spent quite a bit of time examining case studies from all different parts of the world, and it helped me realize the need for societies and governments to engage in experimentation when it comes to education specifically. Traditional education models have not been successful in Nigeria, so we need to branch out and try something new.”