Samuel Ogunsola – Passion in Science Award winner 2024

Sam Ogunsola:
Thank you everyone. Firstly, I want to say a big thank you to NEB for this invitation. It's a great experience even for me as I'm wrapping up my PhD. And also secondly, for the opportunity to talk about shaping African women in STEM.

So anytime I talk about SWISAfrica, the first question I always get is, "You're a guy. Why are you interested in talking about women?" So, I always tell them there's a story behind it. There's a story behind of what I'm going to be sharing with us today. The story as to why I started SWIS Africa. What I've done so far together with my team and what we're going to be doing next. And also, maybe the support we can get and advice we can get from the room.

So, I started SWIS Africa after stumbling on this book. I was just a year after I left, I finished my undergraduate program in biochemistry. So, I was privileged to finish as the best student in my class. And all my friends were very smart ladies. So, after I finished, I read this book by Melinda Gates and there she talked about all her escapades in Africa. The challenges women go through to rise, to become champions, to be able to help their families, to be able to achieve success.

And then I just look at myself and I look at all my friends. A year after, I already gained admission to Canada for my graduate program, but many of them have given up on the even to continue. Some of them left science to start selling things online. Some left and even just forget about science. So, it's painful to see that back home in Africa that actually, guys are more empowered to continue to become doctors while many women just give up on their dream.

So, I did research. And then I also reached out to some of them and asked, "What's going on? Why are you guys not pursuing science? Why are you not following with your dreams?" And these are some of the problems that came up. Number one, stereotypes and biases. The moment you're a woman in Africa, the next thing they tell you is you have to get married. How you go for a PhD and then finish by 30. By then you're already, you've missed it, right? So, you need to finish up undergrad, look for a husband, give birth, and before you know it, they can't go back to school again, or they can't pursue their dream.

The other one is lack of recognition and opportunities. So, the moment you don't even know the opportunities you can apply for, the resources that are available, that also limit them from being able to step forward. And the other one is lack of female role models. So many of them, they don't have the opportunity to see people that have done this thing. Right? If you see someone that come from the trenches, come from a very small background, and getting to rise up to become a director in a company, you can ask, "Oh, I would love to be like this person."

So that's what led me to start SWIS Africa in 2020. Again, as a recent graduate with nothing in my pocket, but I've always loved to use things that I have access to, like my phone, like social media. I think with that I can reach out to people. I can share the things I know, and I can call other people that love what I'm doing to join me to do this. So, we started, and the goal is just to tell stories. That's a simple thing. Tell stories. I believe a lot in stories because I believe through stories I can empower. I can inspire someone. I can celebrate them. I can promote them. I can mentor them. If I share my story with you, you can get to learn something. If you share your story with me, I can get to learn something from you. So, we built everything around storytelling. But even with this, we get to do a lot of projects, a lot of programs to support women. This leads to our vision. So even though we are telling stories, we still want to become that lead organization where African women in STEM are inspired to achieve their purpose.

And that's what we've been doing so far, since we started this organization. We want to be that organization where people can come to and feel safe to be able to share their stories and also to listen to the stories of other women. So, these are our objectives, which are in line with our vision. The first one is to celebrate and promote. So, we do a lot of interviews. We do a lot of programs and also publications. We have a Medium page again, which is free. YouTube is free. So we just use free stuff. So, we use that to celebrate and promote women. And also we train and mentor. We mentor them on important skills and resources they need to excel in their chosen career. So, any decision they make, "Okay, I want to become an entrepreneur. I want to start a company like NEB." Oh, amazing. Come to us. You can learn from someone that was able to do that. And then the third one is engage and shape women with contents and resources that will educate, and enlighten, and empower them in STEM.

So, for each of these objectives, I'm going to be sharing with us what we've done so far and the impact we've made. So, the celebrate and promote, we've interviewed our 70 women. So many of them are across different industries. Some are in the lab. Some are in the industry, maybe in a pharmaceutical company. So, we reach out to them, we send them email, and we invite them. Then we get to interview them for 30 minutes. Where did you come from? How did you get to where you are? What encouragement can you give to a girl back home in Africa that has lost a father and a mother? How do you want that girl to be able to get to where you are today? For instance, we interviewed a lady that lost her dad and lost her mom, and she was an engineer. But she did not give up. And today, now she's a manager of Nestle in Nigeria. So that story now is something we have on our YouTube. So, someone can just get there and get to listen to that and feel inspired.
Over time, we've been able to have over 2000 YouTube views from that. And we've published over 30 blog articles. And we've partnered with several organizations. Some of them are here, like the Carnegie Mellon University in Africa, the African campus. We partnered with them to celebrate 40 top women in tech across Africa. So, we get to reach out to these women. We interviewed them. And we published it on our Medium page and people also get to go there and learn about them.

This Altrina Nigeria one is even more interesting. We did that last year. And it's about women in rural Nigeria, agricultural women in rural Nigeria. These people are in the most remote places in the world. And interestingly, they are the one producing all the foods that we eat in the country, but nobody even knows where they are. Nobody even knows that they exist.
So, we partner with Altrina Nigeria to celebrate 20 of them. And these are women that, some of them, they are in polygamous families. Their husbands don't even take care of them where they still have to do everything to take care of their children. Just doing small agriculture in their backyard. So we get to share their stories and their whole life on our YouTube channel.
Then the other one is train our mentor. So, we have a lot of virtual workshops. We reach out to some of these people. We are lecturers. Some of them are like Phoebe. We graduated together. She's currently in London Business School, she is a petroleum engineer. We invited her to come and talk about mentorship, some of the challenges some of the women in our community are going through. So, we've had over 300 workshop participants that have joined us.

And part of what we do too is an organization recently that came out of SWIS Africa called BioinformHER. We also see another problem in the field, which is learning bioinformatics. I believe some of us, they are computational biologists is rare to even see. There are many women in Africa that don't even want to go near that. Who learn how to put Python, do hear, "No, I don't want to do that."
So, we started this organization last year. And within a year, we have over 7,000 people follow us on LinkedIn because it's something that is needed. So being able to help many of them to get certifications. So, the organization that is outside of SWIS Africa and is currently standing alone to also empower more women.
The other one is engage and shape. So, we currently over 600 email lists where every month we send them an update to send them resources, fellowships to apply for, and things that can help them to develop.

We have over 50k social media engagements because we have this STEM Woman Crush we do every week. So we also pick a woman out there. We just pick them randomly and then we celebrate them. So that we also encourage them that, "Wow, someone actually sees me." I was talking to a lady some month ago, she just started an organization like this. And she was telling me about the experience during her PhD, that nobody ever reached out to her to celebrate her. She goes to the PhD every day, depressed, and come back home. Nobody even sees what she's doing. So being able to pick someone out there and just celebrate them. That will celebrate what you're doing, the effort you're putting into your work. I think that encourages them.
And then we have over 3000 social media subscribers across everything we're doing. So in the past three or four years, I've been working a lot on social media and doing all these things. But then this year, we changed. We don't just want to be online. I think it's also good for us to engage people physically. We want to have a physical community.

And the fact that I'm in Canada, some of my team members are in Nigeria, some are also in the US and also Canada. So we want to start from where we are because African women, they're everywhere. They're in the States. They're in Canada. They're everywhere globally. So getting to bring them together and create that community can also help. And interestingly, towards the end of last, we were able to register the organization in Nigeria. So now it's a fully registered organization. And part of what we wanted to do, to bring what we are doing to physical for people to be able to see. We got a funding from my school, University of Manitoba, to be able to promote some of the things we do physically. And then this, my co-founder, Abosede, she's currently doing her PhD in the US. She was also celebrated by the award based on what we're doing. And then thanks to NEB for celebrating us. And just this past week we got an award in Winnipeg to celebrate the amazing things we're doing to empower women.

So what are the next thing or what are we currently working on? So we have a project we're working on now called the SWIS EmpowerHER. And this came after discussing with people in our community and also doing research. As a senior or as a student that just finished undergrad, there are three decisions that are probably going to make. Number one is to go towards academia, get a master's, get a PhD, become a PI. Or they want to get into the corporate to the industry. Come and work at NEB. Or they want to get into entrepreneurship, start their own business. And if you look at all these trends, they require different things. They require different ideas and experience.Even in the academia, if you want to go into academia, you need to learn how to send emails to professors. You need to learn how to write proposals or you need to learn how to do academic presentation. For me, I struggled with all of these things because I was not taught when I was in school. You have to learn those things outside of school.

So what we want to do is want to prepare final year for female student. For 24 weeks, not every day, just weekends, on Saturdays for 30 hours, we are going to invite experts that we train them on each of these streams that they want to take. So we are going to be having ... The 24 weeks is not going to be training all through. The first eight weeks, we're helping recruiting all the participants. The following eight weeks is for the training, which is divided into two. The first four week is going to be for general training, learning how to present, public speaking, maybe basics of data science, things like that. Why the next four weeks is going to be specific, based on what they want to do. And then the last eight weeks is going to be for mentorship. So after learning what they do, we are going to hand them over to mentors that will now help them.

And interestingly, we partner with an organization in Ghana which has been working on this same thing for over 11 years. So they've been able to help people that today, now they are actually doctors. They're doing well. So they partner with us to be able to teach us on how to go about this. So this is the projects in the works. And interestingly, the $1,000 we're getting from NEB is going to of course, go into this. But this is a big project. We're still trying to see how we can get more funding to make this happen. The other one is the SWIS Africa Research Training Program, the SWIS ART. So I reached out again to the Carnegie Mellon University of Africa to discuss with them about doing another project. But after reaching out, the president told me that there's actually a bigger problem in the school. They have a lot of smart young girls that came into the program, but many of them cannot even talk about their science. They don't have to share their research. They're afraid. Besides that, many of them are no longer interested in research. Once they are done with school, they just want to go into other things.
So I think the reason for that is why you are in the middle of the program, you feel tired. You don't want to continue. So we want to organize a program for them to actually bring people that went through the same process to talk to them about how they overcame the challenge. And then after that we're going to select 10 of them and teach them on scientific research, presentation, personal branding, and storytelling.

And after that we're going to give them a project where they pick a topic of their own choice. And then do a training for 30 minutes, which will be posted on our YouTube channel. Because getting to do that kind of project will also encourage them. So we're currently in partnership with them. This is going to happen maybe by four of this year. So we're still working on that.
And the next one is the High School Empowerment Program. This actually is a project that came before .... Me and my friend, we were discussing about something that just happened in Nigeria. So there was a final year program exam that every high school student have to do before they get into the university. But painfully, out of, I think about 1.7 million, I think over a million of them failed the exam.

So it's actually a big problem now in the country. And we get to now know that there was a challenge with the computer they use for the exam and all of these things. But this shows that there's actually a lot of help that is needed to help some of these young people to be able to pursue their dream. And for a girl now that already failed this exam, there's high chance that they will not get to retake it, because their parents probably use all their life-saving to be able to help them. So what we want today, want to select ... Actually, this project came after a competition we did in my school where we came second. So they give us some money. So we're using the money to help 10 of them to pay for the exam and also train them. So these sub-scholar, they currently have a platform in Africa where people can join to learn how to take all these final exams. So we're going to be partnering with them to help these STEM female student to be able to pay for this exam, and also get them to get into college. So that was a good, but we can increase this number again if you have more finance. So that's why we're trying to reduce the number of people we're working with based on the money we have. And then what our need, the fourth one is team training and mentorship. We're trying to scale our projects. We're now having projects in Nigeria and Rwanda, in Canada, and also in US. So we're trying to learn how to scale this. I would say the major need for the organization is actually for someone like me and also my team members, which are all females, to be able to have access to people that can empower us, teach us on how to scale our projects. The other one is access to grant and funding, all the little funds we have here and there. Besides also my scholarship money has been what we've been using to run this whole thing. So getting access to more funds can help. And platforms for collaboration and partnership. All our projects are based on collaborations because when there's no fund, we look for people that have what we need and then we work with them. So as long as they have ideas, we can be able to move forward.

So we just launched our website actually last month. So the website now, people can reach out to nominate themselves to be interviewed. Or you can also nominate someone, because we cannot reach out to everybody. So in case if you know someone, a Black woman that you think you want us to celebrate, you can nominate a person. And that's our email in case if you have any question or maybe you want to connect with us. And also that's our social media.

Thank you very much.