Anchor heritage bags humaritarian award
Anchor Heritage Initiative
The Emerging African Leaders Academy (EALA), an initiative which showcases the next generation leaders from Africa, has honoured Anchor Heritage Empowerment Initiative (AHEI), a Non Governmental Organization (NGO), for its humanitarian service of providing legal aid and empowerment to prisoners and beautification of Nigerian prisons.
The event, held recently in Lagos, was in efforts to get the world to see Africa from the viewpoint of productivity instead of criticism and for Africans to up to the occasion to always be producers and not just consumers.
The Founder, EALA, Abiola Stephanie Afolabi, who doubles as the Ambassador of Goodwill to the state of Georgia, said the award was to honour people who are out to make impact in their different fields and change the tides of the negative reports around.
She said: “The project EALA started in 2014 in Atlanta Georgia and in 2015 it was launched in Lagos, Nigeria and was also launched in Accra, Ghana in 2016.
“We have run the pilot face of EALA for five years as a project and this is the last year. We have what we call EALA vision 2020, which aims to showcase 2000 leaders from Africa by the year 2020 and then we will start a leadership institute.
“So far, we have been able to identify some impeccable high potential young people who are innovative, creative, dogged and we have honoured them tonight as nation builders who are making impact in the nation.”
President, (AHEI), Bidemi Oladipupo, said the award was a welcome development and motivation to the NGO as it looks forward to reaching out to all prisons in the South West region of the country by the end of 2020.
He said: “We started operations in September 2017 and presently we have reached out to the Kirikiri Medium Prisons and we are working on having a workshop in Kirikiri Maximum Prisons. We’ve been able to beautify the Kirikiri Medium Prisons, and the inmates themselves produced all the paints that were used.
“In this first quarter (Q1) of 2019, we hope to move out to Mandala Prisons at Ilorin, the Ile Ife and Ilesha Prisons in Osun State. We were quite happy when we were called by EALA after they saw our activities and for us it just showed that someone is seeing what we are doing.
“This is really a motivation because I didn’t see myself coming out to this place tonight to receive an award, just in less than 17 months of our operations. We are passionate about nation building and set to work in hand with the respective authorities to change the narratives of our prisons.”
