DR DANIEL OBAKA

CEO

Daniel Newton Obaka/Mentor and Adviser, USA/Nigeria

I’m a nonprofit organization leader and a strategist, the principal founder of Global Integrated Education Volunteers Association, executive director, initiator of Holistic Education Advising and Learning Services, a mentor and advisor with over two decades of outstanding experience in preparing and inspiring youth through education, cultural exchange, and partnership impacting thousands of lives across Nigeria, West Africa, and Africa.
My professional journey began when in 1996, I noticed a persistent general decline in the national standard of education. In addition, there were increasing brain drain in the educational sector and incessant closure of educational institutions due to industrial strikes. This led to founding a nonprofit organization to address the growing challenge. Early 2000, I realize the growing aspirations of young Nigerians to engage and have constructive experience with the evolving global community of students through education, cultural exchanges, and partnership.

I joined the United States Embassy, Nigeria in 2000 to plan and develop the Educational Advising Center (EAC) within the Public Affairs Section of the Embassy to advise and guide Nigerian students planning to study in the United States. My nearly 10 years’ experience at the EAC discovered the need for a platform to reach greater population of students with outstanding academic, leadership, artistic, sporting, and musical potentials through educational advising and mentoring.

At the EAC, I learnt how to manage admission processes and became passionate on building credible procedures and standards for international student’s recruitment and collaborate with other education-related organizations to provide college/career guidance. In the process I discover the power in collaboration and partnership.

With the perennial youth unemployment in the country, I invest time and advise/mentor Nigeria young entrepreneurs learn to focus on youth sustainable transformative start-up in African with emphasis on education, production-based, and agro-allied ventures. Seeing the growing passion for production-based and less dependent on consumer-based economy, I have just initiated Cluster-Collaboration group of entrepreneurs to stimulate production -based economy.

I maintain a network of connections including Learning Institute for Excellence, Education Testing Services, ACT Inc., Education Credential Evaluators, Inc., College Board, and Kuder.

My personal goal is “initiating and building sustainable transformative education platform for social and economic value using the evolving technology

My experiences in educational advising and mentoring are being leveraged by educational institutions, colleges, universities, foreign embassies, parents, testing organizations, and career guidance for advisory services.

MY ONE DREAM is the formation of GIEVA Foundation for Start-Up Nigeria.

“Start-Up Nigeria” is a GIEVA Foundation initiative to celebrate, inspire, and accelerate high-growth entrepreneurship throughout the nation and Africa. This coordinated public/private effort brings together an alliance of the country’s most innovative entrepreneurs, corporations, universities, foundations, and other leaders, working in concert with a wide range of national and international organizations support and encourage pooling resources together of expertise, information, and networking to support the Start-up Nigeria initiative and begin to grow its economy.

The initiation and promotion of entrepreneurship platform is a core purpose of GIEVA Foundation in an effort to generate self-driven and self-directed employment for sustainable growth. Not only do Start-Up Nigeria bring a wealth of transformative innovations to market, they also would play a critical role in job creation across Nigeria geopolitical zones.

It is GIEVA Foundation’s conviction that among the unemployed university and polytechnic graduates is intent on becoming self-reliant and growing businesses to create employments for Start-Up Nigeria. There are among these armies of unemployed graduates’ entrepreneurs in: Science, technology, engineering. & mathematics (STEM); Green agro-allied innovator; Clean Energy; Biomedical sciences; Information technology; and Other fields to build the new industries of the 21st century and solve some of toughest global challenges.

One of the core goals of Start-Up Nigeria is identifying a sustainable means of sourcing for Venture Capitals/Angel Investors to support entrepreneurial innovations and create economic growth and value for public good.

The GIEVA Foundation hopes that and calls on individuals from nonprofit organizations, universities, polytechnics, entrepreneurial training centers to join together with the foundation to promote the success of more entrepreneurs across Nigeria and Africa. The GIEVA Foundation Initiative is a response to “call to action,” uniting a range of public, private, non-profit organizations involvements to:

Create easy access to capital for startups throughout the country;

Expand entrepreneurship education and mentorship programs that empower unemployed youth to create jobs;

Establish GIEVA Foundation-funded research and development programs to generate innovative startups and new production centered industries;

Identify and liaise with government agencies to remove unnecessary barriers to startups;

Expand collaborations and partnership between companies and startups; and

Facilitate and foster the formation of Cluster-Collaboration Groups throughout Nigeria, West Africa, and Africa.