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

I put my own name forward, and that was the hard part.

The Future Awards Africa Independent—TFAAi—opened its first edition this year, and I submitted for the Prize for Education in Oyo State. I wrote the portfolio, gathered the evidence, and sent it in. I’m now one of five nominees on the shortlist.

Now let me be clear, because these things get exaggerated fast: it’s a shortlist, not a win. Five names, and mine is one of them.

But the part I actually want to write about isn’t the shortlist. It’s the week before I hit submit.

What TFAAi is, briefly

If you haven’t come across it, The Future Awards Africa Independent is the state-level, independently run edition of The Future Awards Africa—the prize that’s been recognizing Africans under 31 for years now. The difference is that TFAAi runs state by state instead of nationally, and that’s the part that matters here, because it goes looking in the places the national spotlight tends to skip.

This is its first edition, and the Prize for Education in Oyo State has five nominees. I’m one of them.

The thing nobody says out loud

I sat with that form open for days, and it wasn’t because the work wasn’t there. It was because writing down your own work, in your own words, and then asking a panel of strangers to decide whether it matters, is a kind of exposure that doing the work never asks of you.

You know that feeling when you’ve done the work, but writing it down feels like bragging? Not pride, not modesty, just… discomfort. Like the work is allowed to exist, but you’re not allowed to point at it.

Many of us were told the same thing: do good work quietly, don’t push yourself forward, and if it’s good enough, someone will notice. Let the work speak for itself.

I believed that for a long time.

But it’s wrong—and not because humility is wrong, but because that isn’t what this is. Waiting to be noticed isn’t humility, it’s outsourcing. You’re handing the decision about whether your work counts to whoever happens to be paying attention, and in this country, attention concentrates in a few networks and a few cities.

So if you’re doing serious work in Oyo, or Jos, or Abia, and you’re waiting for the ecosystem to find you, you might be waiting a very long time.

I stopped waiting, and I filled in the form.

What I actually had to write down

And here’s the strange gift of an application: it forces you to look at your own record honestly, because a form doesn’t care how you feel about yourself. It just asks what you did, and who it changed.

I didn’t set out to do education work, by the way. I set out to solve a problem in a hospital.

Starting as 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—and I don’t mean a workshop or a slide deck. I mean sitting beside people, in their own working hours, until the software stopped feeling like a threat. Staff who’d been openly skeptical started using those systems without being asked.

That taught me something I’ve carried into everything since: adoption is a human problem before it’s a technical one. People don’t resist tools; they resist feeling incompetent in front of their colleagues.

Then came Africa Development Summit, where we convened nearly 200 participants from more than six states around skills, entrepreneurship, and the gap between learning and earning. Not a conference for people who’d already arrived, but a room for people still trying to get somewhere.

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

Health, youth development, creative technology. For a long time I couldn’t explain what connected them, and I assumed that made me look unfocused.

But writing the application is what finally showed me the pattern, because all three are the same move: take something people find intimidating, and make it usable.

That’s what education is, and everything else is just delivery format.

I didn’t know that about myself until a form made me say it out loud.

What the TFAAi shortlist actually changed

Honestly? Not much, and that’s 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 to become real.

What changed is that the work is now visible to people who weren’t in the room.

And visibility isn’t vanity, because 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 circles, so being on that list from Oyo isn’t incidental to me. It’s close to the whole point.

What I am doing about it

Not a victory lap, but a continuation.

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

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

And 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’s an application form open somewhere right now with your name missing from it—a prize, a grant, a speaking slot, a cohort, something you’ve quietly decided you’re not ready for, or that it’d be immodest to want.

Fill it in. You probably won’t get it—I’ve applied for far more than I’ve ever received, and most of those went nowhere—but you’ll be forced to write down what you’ve actually done, and you’ll find out whether you can describe it. That alone is worth the discomfort.

And keep records while you’re at it, not for the awards, but for the day someone asks you to prove it and you actually can.

Because the work was there before the list, and it’ll be there after. The only thing that changed is that I stopped waiting to be found.