Social impact is about affecting the lives of people in various aspects, which include access to skill acquisition and empowerment schemes. Daily Trust YOUTHVILLE recently encountered Priscilla Efe Johnson, a youth leader and social impact activist leading social change in Nigeria.
With over seven years’ experience in this sphere, Efe in an interview, said she has worked to earn the sobriquet “Efe Johnson of Impact” among her peers.
While focusing on the empowerment of girls, Efe said she founded “Xari Africa”, a female-focused organisation that provides teenage girls with access to sexual and reproductive health rights and resources and keeps them in school since 2018.
Efe said, “Through my book, ‘Just period it’, over 1,500 girls in northern Nigeria have received free education on menstruation and learnt how to calculate their cycles.
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Nigerian youth, Efe Johnson, championing social impact
“The objective is to break the taboo cycle around sexual and reproductive health in Nigeria and fight for social and gender equity for girls.”
Speaking further, the activist said she was once recognised by the government of Haiti Islands, for her service to humanity through the ‘PeaceX Bookpecker’ project. As a project associate, she helped to rehabilitate out-of-school children affected by earthquakes and violent weather conditions by creating an educational curriculum and delivering lectures online.
The social impact worker is a member of the African youth partnership by YOTA, Ford Foundation and restless development, where she worked with 80 young African leaders to play a leading role in continental efforts for an inclusive and equitable recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Her push for social impact work grew through her time as the first female president of Enactus at the Kaduna State University (KASU), where she led over 200 of the brightest young changemakers on campus, to win the ACT Foundation National Leadership Prize for COVID-19 Leadership.
The winning project was the creation of a social enterprise in the heat of the global pandemic; it provided jobs for stranded students and indigent teachers affected by the sudden lockdown.
Efe further stated: “The proceeds from this business were used to give scholarships to 10 final year students of the university who were on the verge of dropping out of school due to the 100 per cent increase in school fees by the state government.
“All these happened when I was still a student at the university,” she added.
She was also the first person to receive the Most Inspiring Student Award by the KASU’s Dean of Students Affairs, for her contribution to inspiring fellow students to get involved in social impact activities.
In 2021, from over 400 entries from 39 different countries around the world, Efe emerged as one of the 15 winners globally, and top three in the category at the Global Youth for Impact awards, for lending her voice to the fight against Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) where prizes worth $25,000 were given to the winning artists.
“I have also been a Global Youth Ambassador at ‘Theirworld’, a global children’s charity committed to ending the global education crisis, where I work with other young leaders from around the world, to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4, with a focus on girls’ education.”
Efe’s life goal is to leave the world better than she met it, with the watchword – Impact! She prides herself as a broadcaster, having worked with the Christian Broadcasting Network as a TV presenter and host of the hit gospel youth show, ‘One Cubed Naija’, which aired on over 80 channels across several countries in Africa.
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