TFAAi 2026: I Put My Own Name Forward for the Prize for Education

I put my own name forward. That was the hard part.

The Future Awards Africa Independent — TFAAi — opened its first edition this year. I submitted for the Prize for Education in Oyo State. Wrote the portfolio, gathered the evidence, sent it in.

I am now one of five nominees on the shortlist.

Let me be precise, because news like this invites inflation: it is a shortlist, not a win. Five names. Mine is one of them.

But the part I want to write about is not the shortlist. It is the week before I hit submit.

What TFAAi is, briefly

The Future Awards Africa Independent is the state-level, independently run edition of The Future Awards Africa — the long-running prize for Africans under 31 doing serious work. TFAAi runs prizes state by state rather than nationally, which is the part that matters here: it goes looking in places the national spotlight usually skips.

This is its first edition. The Prize for Education in Oyo State has five nominees. I am one of them.

The thing nobody says out loud

I sat with that form open for days.

Not because the work was not there. Because writing down your own work, in your own words, and then asking a panel of strangers to judge whether it matters, feels like a kind of exposure that doing the work never does.

There is a script many of us grew up with. Do good work quietly. Do not push yourself forward. If it is good enough, someone will notice. Let the work speak for itself.

I believed that script for a long time.

It is wrong. Not because humility is wrong — but because that is not what it is. Waiting to be noticed is not humility. It is outsourcing. It hands the decision about whether your work counts to whoever happens to be paying attention, and in this country, attention concentrates in a few postcodes and a few networks.

If you are doing serious work in Oyo, or Jos, or Abia, and you are waiting for the ecosystem to find you, you may wait a long time.

So I stopped waiting. I filled in the form.

What I actually had to write down

Here is the strange gift of an application: it forces you to look at your own record honestly.

I did not set out to do education work. I set out to solve a problem in a hospital.

Starting as a Technical Support staff at Primed E-health, I trained healthcare workers in Ibadan to actually use the digital tools their institutions had already paid for. Not a workshop. Not a slide deck. Sitting beside people, in their own working hours, until the software stopped feeling like a threat. I watched staff who had been openly skeptical start using those systems without being asked.

That taught me something I have carried into everything since: adoption is a human problem before it is a technical one. People do not resist tools. They resist feeling incompetent in front of their colleagues.

Then Africa Development Summit. We convened nearly 200 participants from more than six states, around skills, entrepreneurship, and the pathways between learning and earning. Not a conference for people who had already arrived, but a room for people trying to get somewhere.

And through KO Content Studios, I have spent the last year teaching founders something nobody formally teaches them: how to say what they have built clearly enough that a stranger will trust it.

Three sectors — health, youth development, creative technology. For a long time I could not explain what connected them, and I assumed that made me look unfocused.

Writing the application is what made me see it. The through-line is identical in all three: take something people find intimidating, and make it usable.

That is what education is. Everything else is delivery format.

I did not know that clearly until I was forced to write it down for someone else.

What the TFAAi shortlist actually changed

Not much, honestly. And that is the point.

The work was already valid before the list — the healthcare workers using the systems, the young people who left the summit with a plan, the founders who can now describe their own companies without flinching. None of that needed a panel.

What changed is that the work is now visible to people who were not in the room.

And visibility is not vanity. Visibility is what turns work into partnerships, funding, invitations, and permission for the next person to try. Validation is for you. Visibility is for everyone downstream of you.

A state-level prize is one of the few instruments that deliberately looks outside the usual postcodes. Being on that list from Oyo is not incidental to me. It is close to the whole point.

What I am doing about it

Not a victory lap. A continuation.

ADS keeps running — workshops, programs, and the slow work of building a year-round structure rather than an annual event.

At KO Content Studios, we are building KO-OS, an AI Brand Operating System for founder-led companies. V1 soft-launched in July. Every founder who cannot explain their own company is an education problem wearing a business costume, and that is the problem we are actually solving.

The Builders of Africa podcast continues, because the fastest way to teach founders is to let them hear other founders be honest.

The ask

There is an application form open somewhere right now with your name missing from it.

A prize. A grant. A speaking slot. A cohort. Something you have quietly decided you are not ready for, or that it would be immodest to want.

Fill it in.

You will probably not win. I have not won anything yet either. But you will be forced to write down what you have actually done, and you will find out whether you can describe it. That alone is worth the discomfort.

And keep records — not for the awards, but for the day someone asks you to prove it, and you can.

The work was there before the list. It will be there after. The only thing that changed is that I stopped waiting to be found.