Gravitas Investments Limited, a city development company, recently hosted a youth empowerment programme on emergent and offered the young entrepreneurs who attended the programme insights on talent in building sustainable societies.
The organisation also equipped them with all that they needed to excel in the business world.
The programme took place at Gracefield Island—an emerging city being developed by Gravitas on land reclaimed from the Lagos Lagoon. The city is situated about two kilometres from the Chevron Drive shoreline, off the upcoming Lagos Regional Road.
The event which had a theme, ‘Young Visionaries Exhibition,’ exploited the importance of collaboration, and connection. It recorded over a hundred youths in attendance.
Ferdinand Agu, Director, Gravitas Investments Limited, said that making money was tempting for young people but creating value and solving problem was better.
“As an emergent talent contributing to sustainable cities or societies, I’m making two positions here to the amenities you need. These are your ability to envision and the values that inform your action are the most important,” he said.
“As young men and women, make a reputation for integrity and decency. Otherwise, you cannot be visionary,” he advised. He explained that vision was the ability to think about the future with imagination, adding that wisdom meant having a mental image of a possibility and desirable future states.
Olufemi Babalola, CEO, Gravitas Investment, encouraged the young participants drawn from Europe and America who joined virtually, and from the academia and other professions in Nigeria, to identify their talents, nurture them, and be passionate about performing any task with a spirit of excellence.
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Babalola said that if they applied themselves diligently, the money they probably wanted would come. He noted that, “money is pro-vision. Money tends towards vision— vision, action and passion for excellence first.”
Also, Mary Ojulari, Managing Director, Weststar Associates Limited, said the future belonged to the youth.
She noted that the world was growing younger and more densely populated than ever before. “More than half of the world’s seven billion people are under the age of 30,” she said, citing the UN which projected that, by 2030, 60 percent of urban residents will be under 18.
Continuing, she said, “the youth in our society are the energy of growth and development because they provide the labour force for production of goods and services to take effect. Therefore, the age structure of the population is useful for analysing resource use and formulating future policies and planning goals with regards to infrastructure and development.”
Ojulari encouraged the youths to see opportunities that are in the country, and inspired them to develop solutions for Nigeria that we all hope to see in the coming years.
“Building a new city such as Gracefield Island is a very ambitious adventure and a commendable one. It is looking to create a smart sustainable city with the youths as the core element,” she noted.
Karn Gulati, Director of Strategy, 9mobile, encouraged the participants to explore how they could bring technology to bear on development of Gracefield Idea. In response to Gulati’s encouragement, a start-up firm, AllatApp co-founded by two young ladies, Olumide Oshodi and her team has developed a traffic and security notification system that will be installed as an app on devices.
Taking a cue from Gulati, Stefanie Adisa, an architect from Studio Elemental, emphasised the importance of architects making sure that their individual project designs take the wider urban vicinity into consideration.
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