Edem Dorothy Ossai, Africa Regional Network Coordinator, NORRAG

Edem Dorothy Ossai is a development practitioner specialising in education and gender with over 15 years working in child rights advocacy, universal basic education and gender responsive education planning. As Africa regional network coordinator at NORRAG, they are growing and weaving together a network of experts, and practitioners working on international policies and cooperation in education and training, in Anglophone Africa using social systems mapping.

Currently, she is the founder and director of MAYEIN, a non-profit based in Nigeria working to promote equity in education, entrepreneurship development and girls’ agency. She envisioned the mission, objectives, and strategic action plans, recruited volunteers, built partnerships and raised funds towards a self-sustaining organisation to promote girl education, positive youth development and youth civic education.

Edem led a team to create the first gamified book-a-thon reading experience for teenagers in Nigeria currently in its fifth edition, and hosted in major cities impacting 500+ direct and indirect readers/participants. That isn’t all, she established the first community mobile library in Ojoo municipal district area of Ibadan city, Nigeria, from mapping to partnerships with local book publishers and small library service providers. She developed a young volunteers’ network, fundraising strategies, and a donor database and the mobile library has grown to three primary service hubs and six secondary stations, servicing 1000+ direct users and acting as an implementing partner of Kolibri, a Google-supported e-learning project launched by Learning Equality, a US-based organisation.

In 2017, Ossai initiated ‘Girls Without Borders,’ a school-club-based programme that teaches adolescent girls about their rights and how to exercise their own agency.

In 2016, she was also named a Mandela Washington Fellow by the US State Department and undertook a civic leadership exchange programme at the School of Public Service and Community Solutions at Arizona State University (ASU).

Edem Ossai has led several workshops on gender responsive education planning and programme implementation, including providing consultation to the AU Commission on the review of its draft gender policy. Due to her work in education in emergencies during the COVID-19 led school closures in 2020, she was appointed as a 2021 Echidna Global scholar by Brookings Institution, in Washington DC, where she wrote a policy brief on Gender Responsive Education in Emergencies in Nigeria.

As former country consultant (Nigeria), for Inter-agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE), she was responsible for the implementation of consultation workshops, in-depth interviews and assessments amongst key stakeholders in education and humanitarian actors across Nigeria.