Who is Charles Emembolu? What led you to the IT space?
I’m an IT architect by training and a project manager, a certified project manager. So professionally, that is what I trained in. So, between my profession, which is basically core IT infrastructure, in which I trained to become certified in designing IT systems as an IT architect, I also manage large scale projects. But most of my experience has been in large scale software and hardware projects. So this is my base. And I spent the first 12 or more years of my career basically doing these two things at varying degrees across the telecommunications and financial services industries. But the last 12 to 14 years of my life have been very, very interesting. This is when I began to delve into talent development, whilst running my IT consulting firm. So, sometime in 2013 I decided to leave paid employment completely and build up my consulting firm. Within a year, I discovered a huge talent gap. This was about 2013. I discovered a huge, huge talent gap from the kind of talent that one has access to whilst in the corporate world; which we could attract by virtue of branding of the corporate organization or by virtue of the monies that those organizations could pay. I suddenly realized that there was a lot of rubbish out there. People who could be so much better. Smart individuals but with limited skills. It made me start to think. We started a small training program where I tried to share my knowledge. As a child, my nickname was teacher as I love to impart knowledge. And even at the places where I had worked, I was the IT training manager because I would always create or develop training and begin to request for people to gather for them to learn on specific projects or just in general. So I had started doing that in my place of employment, but the sweet thing about entrepreneurship is that you can actually express yourself. There’s a lot of flexibility. If you can think it, and you have the energy, you can do it. By 2015, I had partnered with a childhood friend, a colleague, and another IT professional called Aniedi. We founded TechQuest Academy together. And I still remember those early days in July, 2015. If I remember correctly, we ran four programs out of Lagos and across different parts of Lagos. It was a summer program, teaching individuals ages 6 to 16 years on how to write computer programs. And the next year we introduced digital electronics. So, they basically learned Scratch, Arduino, Arduino Kit and we would teach them with robotics kits. It was interesting and we sold out our programmes across Lagos. And after that, I was so alive. I thought, wow! We are charging N100,000 per student at the time and the classes were sold out. And back then, digital skills wasn’t a thing, the way it is today. Unemployment too wasn’t a big issue then as there was still a bit of a boom in the air from the 2010 – 2012 boom period. Bankers were still buying brand new cars and people could earn good money as there were jobs if you really wanted to work. So we focused on kids then.
But just to make it chronological, in December 2015, December, I had a chance meeting. I attended the inauguration party for the Vice Chancellor of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka which happens to be my alma mater. The Vice Chancellor and I started talking and we got into a very nice detailed conversation. He said to me, I want to build a smart university. So he invited me to the university and I paid my first visit back to the university since my graduation. I arrived there at night some time in December. They were doing their Christmas Carol that night. I remember it very vividly. And we had a long talk after the Carol Service and had dinner afterwards. And he says me, come back for breakfast and we’ll present on my dining table. I will have a few people for breakfast. So, between that time and the morning, I cooked up a presentation and by then I had understood what he actually meant. Because before that, I had been wondering what he really wanted. Is he looking for smart cards, RFID or what? What was he looking for? What does he mean by a smart university? But at night I suddenly understood that he was looking for smart people, smart students. A thought that came to me was that we could set up a business and talent incubator on campus. So in the morning, I made a short presentation. I still have the slides till date. And I taught him what I felt an incubator was. One of the professors in that room was like, are you talking about eggs? Lol. Is it people you’re using an incubator for? They hadn’t heard things like that before. But the Vice Chancellor was totally sold to the idea. So I said to him, I’ve been visiting quite a few countries lately. I was travelling a lot then and to different countries too, and I still do. And when I go, I don’t just go on vacation or stick only to whatever takes me there. I try to learn something new. So, in incubators, innovation hubs and talent centers are usually places that interest me. I visited quite a few, maybe four different ones. And I said, you know what? I visit China at least twice a year. At the time, I had a partnership with Huawei. I said I would take him there as he needed to come and see what they were doing there. Huawei has a research university that has 3000 students, 3000 researchers. For just Huawei. So it’s not a public university. It’s just for the company. I had been there, and I said I wanted to take him there. I offered to curate the trip so that he could see all the amazing things they are doing in China. He had never been to China. So in February 2016, we flew to China. I had gotten my Chinese friends to curate the trip, so we actually saw more than I typically would see because mine used to be business trips, though I would usually squeeze in a learning opportunity. This trip however was specific so we visited a lot of talent hubs. We eventually met the guy running the Huawei Academy across the country. So two things materialized from that trip. One was that we established the first talent academy in Nigeria and even in Sub-Saharan Africa, actually, called HAINA (Huawei Authorized Information Network Academy). We brought it to Nigeria and domiciled the first one at the University of Nigeria. But the second thing, which has become a significant milestone in my life is that I set up, in partnership with the university and under a public private partnership, Nigeria’s first university embedded incubator. A business and technology incubator. So basically, what does this mean? And by the way, it’s called ROAR. Like the lion’s roar. And those who know UNN well, will be aware that its mascot is a lion. And students of UNN are referred to as lions and lionesses, mimicking the lion in their greetings. So that’s how ROAR grew there. The ROAR hub became a popular milestone there. And with ROAR we’ve achieved so many things over the years, which is basically taking a lot of student-led businesses, getting them access to researchers on campus and having them have their first taste at building technology enabled businesses. Most of the businesses will not become Paystacks directly, but it’s an incubator.
I still remember standing on that podium the first few times and I heard so many things like, so what you mean is that you’re here to steal our ideas? And then we had a mandate which said you couldn’t be accepted at the hub if you didn’t have a co-founder. Now, for those who know about people from my tribe, they are well known for running one man businesses that they will hand over to their wife, children and even grandchildren. And here we were, trying to use this hub to break that mindset by saying if you want to come into this nice space, you must have a co-founder. So many of them will insist that they can do everything by themselves but we said no, you must have a co-founder. So these are some simple things that incubators do. We like to talk about the big ones, but I can tell you that a lot of our founders have come out from there to start their second business, their third business, or to run businesses other people have built. And because of that early experience, they have more potential for success. So, it’s an incubator in the real sense. It just incubates your mind and enables you with basic early skills. It’s not necessarily an accelerator where you’re trying to make a million dollars. Even though we hope to get there someday. So, we began to run these two talent accelerators, TechQuest focusing on digital skills and Roar, which also did a bit of digital skills but focusing on research supported or research enabled business and technology enabled business.
And then keep in mind that on the side, I was still running my consulting business, which is what paid the bills. Truth is that a lot of these things are passion businesses. Increasingly, it’s getting better because I know that TechQuest just before COVID began to pay its salaries. But before then, we would have to always pay their salaries from Crestsage, which is the IT consulting firm. ROAR still doesn’t pay its salaries. We actually pay. The university provides support with generators and power and a few support staff but we provide for the rest. So that’s basically how that runs.
Then in 2018, we had a meetup at Arusha. A few friends of mine had a conversation on how to build a synergy around this whole incubation and talent for innovation hub space. And in 2019, I became one of the founders of an innovation network called Innovation Support Network Hub. I still remember the first physical meeting at Impact Hub Lagos in early February 2019, where I did a presentation on the corporate governance structure. It was called HOV, Hub owners village then before changing the name to ISN Hub. We still have the group WhatsApp platform till date. We left it there and continue to make reference to it when necessary. So, we founded ISN in 2019. We were able to put together 75 innovation hubs across Nigeria under that platform. We were not really sure what to do with it. We were sure we needed to be together and we knew we needed to have one voice. We needed to leverage our strengths. And to that’s how ISN took off. We had the first board, led by Tommy Davies. During that period, I was quite busy. COVID was good to me, very good to me. My family lived in the UK and as I returned to Nigeria at the end of January 2020 after spending Christmas with them, COVID struck. So I’m fast-forwarding now to 2020 to show how things moved. I never thought that they would lock down the world so I stayed back. A mistake. I ended up spending five months here alone. But it was very good for me because I lead a very, very busy life. So since I started working until then, I had never had time to myself, to sit down, locked up and to review the past several years of my life. Two things came out of it. One is that I was able to take stock. I found out that less than 10% of my efforts brought me 90% of the money. The 90 -10 or 80 -20 rule, as some people may say. So that enabled me to decide what I would do for money and how much time I would give to it. That released a little bit more time for me. Not that the time became free, but it just kind of pushed it into the areas that I felt more alive and more interested in. So that enabled me to also take a decision. I said I was going to give a lot more time to things like TechQuest, talent development generally, and the ISN Hub. I had been invited in 2019 to join the board of ISN but I was like, man, I’m never gonna have this time. You guys should just go ahead. Some others jumped in headlong. I didn’t. But by the end of COVID, end of 2020, I decided I was going to put a lot of time and effort into trying to help in more direct ways to build out Nigeria’s innovation ecosystem. Fast forwarding to the end of 2020 and early 2021, I ran for office at ISN and I chose the office to run for. I wanted an office that aligned with my strength, as I have a natural ability to build partnerships. I had been building them all my life. By the time that I ran for the office, I had already streamlined my business as I had decided that I was going to do a lot more in uplifting, supporting, and growing talent out of Africa. I had been trained, highly trained. I don’t even think I use my training in my areas of training judiciously, because I don’t do as much engineering as I can do. I do a lot more business than engineering, but I had been thoroughly trained in engineering and I thought that it was very, very vital if we are going to move forward as a people. So I decided to invest a lot more time, not in training people in engineering directly or doing more engineering, but in supporting organizations that can cause those kinds of things to happen at scale. Because even if I train, maybe I can train 10 people, maybe 20 or even 50, but my work in ISN is supporting 192 hubs today. If there’s any small uplift, each of those hubs have a community. Maybe if you mentioned your village now, you will find out that there is a hub in your village or community or state capital that is training people daily, who I don’t directly train. This means that my work is even more impactful, indirectly. So that was what I decided to do. Also, I had a building in Lagos which I had developed, that was ready before COVID. It just hadn’t been fitted out yet but I had developed it into 13 apartments for rent. It was ready. I then said to myself, the work that we are doing at ROAR in UNN is so impactful, maybe I need to allocate more resources. So that was when we converted that entire space into what you know today as the TechQuest hub in Lagos. So, I have a hub in Lekki currently that can take up to 350 people. I just changed the use of that facility and put it out to talent development. We just finished training about 400 people, though hybrid, with funding by South Africa.
And then last week, we just kicked off another three trainings funded by the Germans and the European Union. So those are the kind of things we do there that are very interesting. Today, I am the chairman of the board for Innovation Support Network Hub, leading that board and in the process moving it from about 112 innovation hubs to 192 across 31 out of 36 states in Nigeria today. And we want to cover all 36 states before the expiration of my tenure in another 1½ years. So that is a bit about who I am. This is what I’ve been doing. This is my life’s work. But last year, I also partnered with an organization called Dexude with a partner of mine who coincidentally was a student at UNN when I founded ROAR and was one of our first startup founders with a business called Tentacles. He later moved on from there, started another business and relocated to Finland. During his visit to Nigeria in December 2022, I convinced him that we needed to partner to build Dexude. And today I’m happy to say that Dexude is a Finland and Nigeria based organization and we just got approved by Business Finland under the Tempo programme, to export our talent, our programme and platform across the world and across the emerging market, starting with Africa. We are currently deploying our pilot project in Nigeria and we’ve just released last month, our AI tool called Uzo AI. So this is where I am and these are the things I’m doing at this point. That’s a little bit of my journey so far. But there’s one more thing and that’s The Omniverse.
In 2018 I decided that it was important for us to start telling our stories. I approached a few people and one of the people who bought into that vision because of his own past works was Obi Asika. So we actually started building what we called the Reimagine Africa. We did video shoots. I still have them but they have never been released. I’ve never released the videos though they’re quite iconic. Obi consulted for me on it and he sent the filming crew. We captured all of the innovation coming out of the southeast, with the professors and researchers of UNN, and the students that we were building out of ROAR at the time – put it together into some kind of documentary, but somehow we never did get it off the ground as COVID stroke. But then in 2022, when I had become the Partnerships director at ISN, I started muting that idea again. Obi was muting something similar and so we decided that the best thing was to bring the tech and the creative ecosystems together. That is how The Omniverse was born in 2023 though the four day Summit actually took place from February 27 to March 1, 2024. It was a collaborative effort. You may have noticed that we brought in different ecosystem leaders. ISN was running the deal room. The gaming tournament was run by a group from the gaming industry. We had Beat FM run the music conference, we had the Ministry of Arts, Culture and Creative Economy run the creative industries conference and we had the Digital Transformation Center Nigeria too. So, The Omniverse was born out of that. I’m happy to say that we had almost 10,000 footfalls over four days at the Landmark Centre. And we’ve already set the dates for next year. Same date, same location. And we hope to have double that number of people. I think we had 12 countries represented at this maiden event. We plan to have at least 20 represented next year. So, Omniverse is part of that story that brings together different industries; two industries that have the most futuristic outlook, tech, and the creative industry. So, we did that. And we are very excited about the possibilities.
Africa is generally lagging behind other continents in the area of education. Do you see AI as an opportunity for Africa to leapfrog?
Have you used ChatGPT before? You know it doesn’t make sense. It’s like, how? How is this even possible? If I was an African government, I would start that curriculum in primary one. I will start the AI curriculum in primary one. And I’m not talking about just the Egyptian story. You look at it from even the slaves that were exported. You saw how they changed cultures, dancing, diversity and so on. They went with everything. Even our food, you know, like it’s us. And AI is that first level digitalization that is interactive. Books are not interactive. Books were the things that they used to colonize the world – knowledge, learning and purpose. But AI is interactive and is real time. You can train it immediately. I can tell it now that I’m going to be talking to these two people today, these two gentlemen from EduTimes Africa and that this is what I want to reflect on. And there and then, in curating, it will take a little bit of the past, a little of what I’ve told it that I need to present and a bit of a future. But it’s so iterative that if you took the output of my own iteration immediately, you can create something in just a few seconds. So when you use the word leapfrog, some of the biggest examples from an economic standpoint are the Tiger economies of Asia and the way they grew. You can look at the exponential growth of India too. Look at what India has done with Microsoft. I think it was Microsoft 93 that they were coding in both America and in India, and interchanging every night. See how that has made India become the tech capital of the world today, just because they had transcontinental cables that brought high speed internet that connected both worlds. The new best thing is AI and I think Africa can reap the most from the opportunity. The other continents are kind of more advanced than we are, but we have the youngest population. We’re also in the deepest valleys that you can ever think of in terms of development, talent and what have you, so with a change of just 5% using a tool like AI, the impact will be far bigger and further reaching than whatever you could expect to see out of Europe or America and maybe even Asia. So that question goes without saying, and what I tell people is that our governments, our organizations, our people need to embrace it completely. And in embracing it, the first thing is to dominate it. It means that we need to contribute, not consume. Consumption is important and it’s actually the objective, but we need to contribute to AI through our creative sector, our agricultural sector and our technology sector etc. In 2011, I attended a conference in Scotland hosted by a British woman and the thing was called ‘What Africa has Refused to Share’. I walked into a small room at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. And this woman had put out a small exhibition of different produce that come from Africa.
She had a map which indicated where each produce could be found, the botanical name, the industrial uses, the economic value and things like that. And I saw a lot of things that I saw while growing up that seem to have disappeared. Back in those days we used to have an Okwa on the center table in our living room. Okwa is like a bowl that you can put things like kola nuts or alligator pepper in. So as children, we would pass by, pick one, crack it open with your teeth, taste that peppery bit and move on. And our people also have a saying that he who brings kola nut brings life. So you see, that’s the medicinal part of kola nut plus the unquantifiable medicinal and health benefits of alligator pepper which was always sitting right in the center of our parlor as a little kid but all that has disappeared today. If you come to my house today and I serve you alligator pepper and kola nuts, you would probably call me a traditional or local man, wouldn’t you? You would rather expect something like Glenfiddich. So you can see how we’ve exchanged what was so valuable, which by the way, the world does not have, with Western customs. I can go on and on but for the purpose of brevity, I’m just saying that on the agricultural produce side, that conference showcased how wonderfully endowed we are in Africa. There are so many fruits that grow in the village. As dry as it is, if you wash tomatoes in a basket and pour the water out the back, come back a few weeks later, and you will see tomatoes growing and they will actually bear fruit. So basically, I’m saying that AI, artificial intelligence, is super important and we need to take what we have in the brain, underneath the ground, above the ground, put it and ensure that we contribute significantly through science, technology and innovation.
(You can read the concluding part of this exclusive interview with Charles Emembolu in the July issue)
__________________ Charles is a thoroughbred professional with over eighteen years cognate experience in the areas of telecommunications, IT strategy, project & change management (P3CM). Business transformation and entrepreneurship. He commenced his career in the telecommunications sector with stints at Bourdex Telecoms and GS Telecoms (now Vodacom). He has consistently championed innovation and technology local talent development using a global market approach. He Co-founded Roar Nigeria Hub, Nigeria's first university-embedded, private sector led technology incubator established in partnership with the University of Nigeria in 2016. With more than a decade of experience. He has founded and supported various technology and innovation-focused organizations. He is also the Co-Founder of TechQuest, a not for Profit Science, Technology. Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Organization. Together, TechQuest and Roar Nigeria have impacted over 60,000 young Nigerians through entrepreneurship support, business incubation, and digital literacy skills. Charles founded Crestsage Limited in 2010, an IT consulting firm delivering enterprise solutions for corporates, academia, and government. Charles is a trained IT architect, certified project manager, and has attended academic programs at institutions like University of Nigeria, Lagos Business School, Lund and Harvard University. Charles is an investor, industry leader, and an international speaker, with several publications and articles. Driven by his passion for collaborative innovation, Charles is the current Board Chairman at Innovation Support Network (ISN) in Nigeria, which represents over 150 incubators, accelerators, and innovation hubs and Co-Convener of Omniverse Africa. This role aligns perfectly with his wealth of experience, ambition and dedication to enhancing strategic collaboration.