Every young person will be mentored by something, whether social media, peer pressure, or a deliberate guide.

Unekwu Noel Abdullahi is the founder of Navigating With Noel, a youth development organisation that has equipped over 500 young people across Africa and the diaspora through mentoring and skills training. A former earth scientist who spent two decades with Chevron Nigeria, he now leads Disc Consult, an AI transformation consultancy based in Plano, Texas. He is a pastor, and he and his wife Lucy have been married for over twenty years. In this interview, he shares his philanthropic journey and passion to equip the youth for success.

What inspired you to create Navigating With Noel, and can you talk more about it?

It began with a question I could not answer. In 2011, I was on a missionary trip to Ghana. My team and I were sharing the gospel with young men caught up in internet fraud, what we call “Yahoo Yahoo.” We told them to turn away from it. Then one of them looked at me and asked, “What do we do now? This business is all we know.”

That question hit me like a punch. I realised those young men were not only spiritually lost; they were economically trapped. They had real skills- technical, communication, marketing- and they were pointing all of it in the wrong direction because nobody had shown them a legitimate alternative. I saw something that day that has shaped everything since: faith without practical opportunity is incomplete evangelism. Sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do for a young man is teach him a skill that legally puts food on his table.

I also understood that question personally. From the age of four, I was raised by my elder brother, a military officer who gave me structure, discipline, and a picture of what a responsible man looks like. Later, God placed spiritual fathers in my path who did the same for my inner man. I did not become who I am because I was brilliant. I became who I am because somebody navigated with me. Those young men in Ghana had nobody. So, we bought a few computers, with the support of my principal Pastor Afolabi Oladele, and we started a small knowledge centre right there in Ghana.

The gospel came with a computer. It did not transform hundreds of lives, but it taught me a great deal. Years later, serving as a youth pastor in Lagos, I was surrounded by bright, educated, jobless young people. Degrees but no opportunities. Potential but no pathways. My partner and I put a substantial amount of our own money, not donor funds, not venture capital, into a startup to train and employ them. That one did not succeed in the traditional sense either. I do not call those years failures. I call them expensive education. Ghana taught me about need. The Lagos startup taught me about sustainability. Those lessons converged into Navigating With Noel. NWN carries the same urgent mission as those early experiments, but this time it was built to scale and built to last. Christ-centred but skills-focused. Character and competence together, because technical skill without character simply produces a more sophisticated criminal.

Can you share some of the challenges you encountered from the beginning and how you were able to surmount them?

The first was funding. For most of our existence, NWN has been almost entirely founder-funded. I paid for it out of my own pocket because I believed in it, and I hold to the principle that if you are not willing to personally sacrifice for a vision, you cannot expect others to believe in it. But a vision that depends permanently on one man’s wallet is not a vision; it is a hobby with good intentions. We are now deliberately restructuring: documenting our impact properly, building a board with real governance, and opening up to grants, CSR partnerships, and programme sponsors.

The second was the model itself. The right vision with the wrong model will frustrate you. Before NWN worked, two earlier attempts did not. We had to learn that mentoring one person at a time is powerful but does not scale, that training people is not the same as employing them, and that something spiritual still has to be financially sustainable. NWN is on its fourth iteration for that reason.

The third was people and distance. Volunteers are enthusiastic in January and invisible by March, and I live and work in the United States while much of our community is in Nigeria. We solved both the same way: by building systems rather than depending on my presence. Country directors, assigned coaches, defined roles, service-level expectations, and a leadership team that can run programmes whether or not I am in the room.

Talk about some of the remarkable achievements the foundation has made since it started?

Six years in, we have impacted over 500 young people, delivered more than 50 programmes, and built a digital community of over 5,000 members across Africa and the diaspora. We have delivered over 1,000 hours of structured learning. But the numbers I am proudest of are the smaller ones. Our Life Ready Individual programme takes young people through six months of structured mentoring, with a personal coach assigned to each one based on a personality assessment, not guesswork. We have created pathways into legitimate employment and entrepreneurship.

We have taken sessions into secondary schools for International Youth Day and the International Day of the Girl Child. We have run financial literacy work like our “Ponzi, Pyramids and Promises” webinar at a time when young Nigerians were losing their savings to schemes. And we have built something that outlasts me: a board of trustees, a structured leadership team, country and regional directors, and an alumni body we are now organising into a proper network. That is the real achievement. NWN is no longer just Noel.

What values and principles have led to your success?

Christ-centredness first. I do not separate my faith from my work. It is the same man in the pulpit, in the boardroom, and in a mentoring session. Character and competence together. This is not a slogan for us; it is a lesson we learned the hard way in Ghana. Skills without character produce a smarter criminal. Character without skills produces a sincere person who still cannot feed his family. We refuse to separate the two.

Integrity over visibility. We would rather run one programme well than five programmes loudly. In an age where everybody is performing impact on social media, we have chosen to actually do the work and report it honestly, including the parts that did not go well. Accountability is one of our three pillars for a reason. On good teams, coaches hold players accountable. On great teams, players hold each other accountable. That is the culture we are building. Every naira, every hour, and every relationship is held in trust. I ask a simple question before any decision: would I be comfortable explaining this openly? And finally, systems over personalities. I am building an organisation, not a following.

You seem so passionate about mentoring youth. What role do you think mentorship plays in shaping the future of young minds?

Mentorship is the difference between information and navigation. Think of it this way. A map tells you where the roads are. A compass tells you which direction you are facing, but a guide who has walked the terrain tells you which road floods in the rainy season. Young people today have unlimited access to maps. The internet has given them more information than any generation in history. What they do not have is someone who has walked the terrain.

Mentorship compresses time. It allows a 23-year-old to avoid a mistake that cost a 50-year-old a decade. It also does something information cannot do: it transfers character. You cannot download integrity. You catch it from proximity to someone who has it. And it is not optional. Every young person will be mentored by something, whether social media, peer pressure, or a deliberate guide. The young men I met in Ghana had been mentored, just not by anyone who wished them well. The question is never whether they will be shaped. The question is who is doing the shaping.

What valuable lessons have you learnt in your philanthropic journey?

Four lessons, and I paid for most of them. Passion is not a plan. I funded this work from my own resources for years because I was passionate. Passion started it. Only structure sustained it. A failed attempt is not a wasted one. Two of my earlier ventures did not work. But unshakeable resolve is not born from immediate success; it is born from repeated attempts. What looked like failure was research and development, and it is the only reason NWN was built correctly. Free is not always valued. When everything is free, some people treat it casually. We have learned to ask for commitment, attendance, assignments, and accountability, even when we are not asking for money. And the deepest lesson: do not build a monument, build a mechanism. Anything that grows in a day dies in a day. If the work collapses when you step away, you have not helped anyone; you have only made yourself necessary.

What is your advice to young people experiencing struggle in their life right now?

Firstly, do not confuse a delay with a denial. Your timeline is not your verdict. I have watched too many young people write themselves off at 25 over a situation that was a chapter, not the book. Secondly, take inventory before you take action. Before you set another goal, sit down and honestly assess where you are: your skills, your character, your relationships, your finances. Most people fail their goals not because they lacked ambition but because they built on a foundation they had never examined.

Thirdly, learn the art of the comeback. Most things will not work the first time. Moses missed it. David missed it. Peter missed it. The difference between David and Saul was not that one never failed; it is that one always came back. If you lack the capacity to return after a setback, you are finished before you start. Fourthly, do not struggle in isolation. Isolation is where struggle does its worst damage. Find a community and mentor. You cannot read the label from inside the bottle. And finally, your struggle is preparation, not punishment. The pressure you are under right now is shaping the person who will carry what you are asking God for.