Three Nigerians Just Put ₦250 Million on the Table for Graduates Who Cannot Find Jobs
A Chess master, a Tech founder and a Software engineer. Three unlikely partners with one straightforward mission: give Nigerian graduates the skills employers are actually paying for.
Chess in Slums Africa founder Tunde Onakoya has joined Jobs59 founder Sam Otigba and AltSchool Africa founder HackSultan to launch a ₦250 million scholarship fund for NYSC members and recent graduates seeking careers in technology, and the language they used to describe it says everything about where this initiative is coming from.
“We’re solving the Olodo uprising pandemic, one NYSC at a time,” Otigba wrote on X when he announced the programme, and the phrase captures something real about the problem the scholarship is designed to address, a generation of Nigerian graduates completing their degrees, serving their year with NYSC and arriving at the job market to find that what they studied and what employers need are two very different things.
The scholarship bridges that gap with something practical.
Each successful applicant will receive ₦160,000, broken down as ₦10,000 to cover the application fee and ₦150,000 toward tuition, to study any diploma programme at AltSchool Africa across a 9 to 12 month curriculum, alongside career mentorship, internship opportunities and job placement support through Jobs59.
Eligible diploma programmes include AI, cybersecurity, cloud engineering, data analysis, product management and digital marketing automation, all courses built around practical, hands-on learning designed to produce graduates who can do the job from day one rather than spend another six months being trained by the employer they worked to impress.
The laptop barrier gets addressed too. Selected beneficiaries who do not own a laptop can apply separately for a Laptop Scholarship Add-on, which provides free devices to eliminate hardware as a barrier to completing the programme, because the organisers understand that enrolling someone in a technology course without ensuring they have a computer to learn on is not a solution, it is a different version of the same problem.
Onakoya, supporting the programme as a youth development partner, said the initiative would help young Nigerians develop discipline, resilience and practical career skills while preparing them for opportunities after completing the NYSC programme.
The three founders behind this initiative have spent their careers in different corners of Nigeria’s development ecosystem, Onakoya building chess communities in underserved areas and breaking world records to put a spotlight on what Nigerian children are capable of, HackSultan building AltSchool Africa into one of the continent’s most respected online tech education platforms, and Otigba creating Jobs59 as a bridge between skilled graduates and the companies looking to hire them, and the combination of what each brings to this scholarship makes it more than a funding announcement.
It is an ecosystem play, education plus placement plus hardware, structured around the insight that none of those three things works properly without the other two.
Eligibility is open to current NYSC corps members, prospective corps members preparing for service and recent NYSC alumni, and applications are live now at AltSchoolAfrica.com/nysc.
If you know a recent graduate who deserves this, the link is in their hands.
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