I started working for community development in my home country, Benin, when I was 15 years old. At that time in Benin, teenagers where abandoning our traditional clothes for jeans and American hip-hop style. They wouldn't go to school anymore and wanted to be gangsters because this was how hip-hop stars lived, they thought. So as a solution I started a hip-hop group that wore simple African fabrics and all of the members were scholars. I contacted two others who shared my idea, and together we created a successful group that celebrated our culture and did not equate creative hip-hop skills with living in unfavorable conditions. After this small success in making a change, I explored other ways in which I could gather people to promote our cultural heritage yet push our generation further for our own betterment.
In 2006, I created the Benin Youth Union Club. We organized a yearly Christmas celebration for underprivileged elementary school students in rural Benin, ecotourism for older students so that they might experience other parts of our country, and a student conference on civil rights and HIV/AIDS. The Benin Youth Union Club became the registered NGO, VEEH-RuA (Volunteers for Education, Environment and Health in Rural Areas), in 2008. After I moved to the United States, I registered my organization as a nonprofit in Ohio and changed the name to Novi. I taught myself how to make a website, and I developed www.noviafrica.org. The mission of NOVI NGO is to provide tools for a self-sufficient and sustainable West Africa. Some of our current and upcoming projects include building a community library in Allada, Benin, conducting the yearly Christmas celebration, organizing a summit on entrepreneurial and ethical leadership, and planting trees for Arbor Day.
However, organizing social programs for the people of Benin seemed incomplete to enact tangible, sustainable change in the quality of life in Benin. Thus I have begun the process to develop a social entrepreneurship that will sustain Novi NGO’s social initiatives with profit made from a fair trade business. I am currently in the process of organizing artisans and tailors in Benin to develop a line of clothing, bedding, and accessories made of African fabrics that we will sell online, in the U.S., in Europe, and in Benin. My goal is to make Novi NGO completely sustainable by this enterprise, Novi Boutik, in five to seven years.
When leaving the major city of Cotonou, Benin, for Allada, about forty-five minutes to the north, you pass the University, several towns, and fields of tropical plants. In my days at University in Cotonou, I would take a taxi home on the weekends to visit my family and friends. Riding on the otherwise flat terrain, I would feel the taxi dip down then up a lush, green hill, then another one. The taxi, stuffed to the roof with people and market goods, would strain its way up the second hill to arrive in my hometown, Allada, and I would know I was home.
Allada is the town that raised me. I attended primary, secondary, and high school there. It is the place where my creativity was born by my own initiative, despite the fact that my educational system frowned upon it. It is the place where I learned that no matter the system in which I work, I can make change with my creativity. It is the town that I picture when I envision a new development for Africa, one that does not seek to resemble the West, but one that will embody our very own version of balanced development.
I wish to see an integrated, balanced West Africa. I want to inspire pride, initiative, and hard work in Africans so that we might, together, create an economy that thrives without sacrificing our environment, a health care system that does not disregard our traditional, age-old knowledge, an educational system that encourages children to discover their own passions, and a new mentality that we have the power and ability to help ourselves.
I began the Benin Youth Union Club in Allada in 2006. I completed my bachelor’s degree at the Université Catholique de l’Afrique de l’Ouest in environmental and urban management in 2008. I worked for a construction business in Benin, GOBE Sarl, in marketing and development. Later that same year, I moved to the United States and continued to work on the projects of my nonprofit organization, Novi NGO (formerly VEEH-RuA). I developed my skills as webmaster and director while working full time as a soil science research associate at The Ohio State University. I am currently in the process of developing Novi Boutik, a fair-trade business of clothing, bedding, and accessories made from African fabric that will eventually financially sustain the social initiatives of Novi NGO. I speak Fon, French, English, Mina, Yoruba, Aizo, and Goun.
