Olayebi: Nigeria Yet to Explore Leather Industry to Spur Economic Growth

In this interview with Oluchi Chibuzor and Hamid Ayodeji, the CEO/ Founder FemiHandBags and Lagos leather fair, Femi Olayebi, highlights how the country through effective industry-based collaboration can spur the leather industry in the country.

Tell us about your partnership with Mastercard Foundation to create an initiative such as Kafawa?

The Mastercard Foundation is a noteworthy organization with massive goals and equal-sized plans to follow. Their Young Africa Works program is designed to tackle the problem of youth unemployment across the continent: by 2030, the Foundation aims to secure dignified and fulfilling employment for 30 million young people, especially women, across Africa. Over the past half-decade, My World of Bags, through FemiHandbags, has been training young people in partnership with the Nigerian Export Promotion Council; and with the support of Bank of Industry and Providus Bank, has launched a platform for increased visibility for Nigerian leather designers, through Lagos Leather Fair. These initiatives have aligned our goals with various aspects of the Young Africa Works strategy and led to a partnership that birthed the Kafawa Training Program in 2021. Through Kafawa, we hope to train hundreds of thousands of youth and improve their access to both paid and self-employment opportunities; beyond that, we also hope to be able to provide new and relevant insights to the Foundation, to further expand their impact and bring us all much closer to the goal. 

How crucial is the role of access to capital for budding entrepreneurs?

It is one thing to equip the unemployed and underserved youths with the right skill set that makes them either employable or ready to stand on their own, and it is quite another to provide them with access to the funds that can help them set up businesses that feed into their economic outcomes. Naturally, financial literacy is necessary, in order to educate and re-orientate individuals seeking capital on how to effectively utilize startup capital, and how to remain accountable. Beyond that, it helps these micro-and small business owners to even assess how much they need in the first place.

One key learning I have gained as an entrepreneur is that no matter how skilled you are if you do not have the sufficient funds to source the right tools and materials to help you actualize and develop this skill, many business goals remain unachievable. Yet, while the role of capital cannot be under-estimated, we emphasize to our trainees the need to save money and start with what they have – and sometimes, all that is, is a skill. Some trainees on the program have been highly resourceful – some have sold what they have produced in class to begin to create the funds that they can invest in future businesses; some have joined the program’s placement scheme to gain access to full-time jobs where they can earn an income and gain the capital they need; some are partnering with their peers to pool resources to create viable businesses. The fact is, starting with the base resources one already has – whether it’s one bag of tools or one machine or even tools that can be improvised to achieve the same results as a machine – creates a foundation with which to build, and ultimately, that consistency in building is what often attracts prospective investors. Or better yet, it creates a proof of concept that helps small businesses to better communicate their value and position to gain the capital they need.

From your experience, what would you say are the biggest challenges facing the leather manufacturing sector and how best can they be tackled?

Although the manufacturing industry makes up 38.33% of the Nigerian economy and the leather sector alone employs over 750,000 workers, the challenges facing the industry are unfortunately numerous, and they are all quite significant. 

The cost of production is quite high because of a lack of proper industry infrastructure, a lack of good quality raw materials, and a difficult business environment where access to basic necessities like electricity is limited. Finding highly-skilled workers who understand quality, detail and are able to maintain a strong work ethic makes it difficult for businesses to create and/or sustain high standards. A lack of high-quality hardware results in a reliance on importation, which can be highly expensive. For large brands, these challenges are hurdles; and for up-and-coming brands, these can prove detrimental to sustaining a business. 

In 2017, I took a bold step and created the Lagos Leather Fair, a platform designed to promote Nigerian talent, tackle the industry challenges, and begin to unlock the massive potential of the leather industry in Nigeria. Lagos Leather Fair levels the playing field and creates a means through which businesses of all sizes can network and potentially begin to collaborate to collectively address some of these problems. Through Kafawa, and with the help of numerous partners, we are actively tackling one of these problems – skilled manpower. Our hope is that by creating more industry players, we create more solution providers.

Your organisation recently partnered with Mastercard Foundation to launch the Kafawa Training Program – what is the program’s mission and vision?

My World of Bags’ partnership with Mastercard Foundation has been transformative – it has brought some of our biggest goals and plans to life in such significant ways, and the Kafawa Training Program is one major one. The word ‘Kafawa’ loosely translates to ‘establishment’ in Hausa – and as the name implies, the initiative is designed to establish a highly-skilled generation of youth to enhance the quality of workmanship in Nigeria’s leather and non-leather industries, and begin to tackle the problem of unemployment across the country.  

We recognize that Nigeria is rich with potential – with millions of young people currently underserved and unemployed, much of that potential remains untapped. The program is on a mission to equip Nigerian youth with hard and soft skills that will ultimately create the country’s next generation of business owners, employers of labor, and industry leaders. Furthermore, the goal is to simultaneously invest the necessary skills into Nigeria’s manufacturing industry – particularly in the country’s high-potential, high-value leather industry. Having operated in the leather industry for many years, through my brand FemiHandbags, I have seen first-hand how the dearth of skilled manpower has limited the growth and expansion of strong brands. Kafawa is designed to be a multi-faceted solution to these issues.

How have you been able to develop a curriculum that feeds into bridging the skills gap within the manufacturing industry?

We have developed what we like to call a “living” curriculum – which means that it is extremely flexible and consistently adaptable to the needs of the industry. Using the Technical Industrial Vocational and Entrepreneurship Training (TIVET) standards, we have established partnerships with industry experts and partners who feed into the development of each course curriculum. Findings from our research activities provided additional insight into the skills gap across leather and non-leather industries. These findings were also incorporated into the design of the curriculum, in order to ensure that all the content would be significantly value-adding for our trainees.

Having been a key player within the industry, My World of Bags recognizes that being employable also requires that individuals have certain soft skills such as design thinking, workplace habits, emotional intelligence, customer service, communication skills, and so on. Therefore, it has been very important for our curriculum to be broadly holistic, and effectively combine hard skills course curricula with a soft skills focus. To allow for a ripple-effect system – where the graduate-trainees can go on to establish themselves and in turn employ more young people that they would go on to train, we also included an Entrepreneurship course facilitated by the Enterprise Development Centre of the Lagos Business School (Pan Atlantic University). Other elements of our curriculum include activities like business plan pitching, group coaching, peer-to-peer mentoring, and so many more training models that create growth and mindset shift opportunities for young people – so that they view manufacturing work as dignified and fulfilling.

How do you see the Kafawa Training Program impacting the Nigerian economy in the coming years?

We are immensely excited about the potential impact of Kafawa on the wider Nigerian economy. In the coming years, we hope to train tens of thousands of young people across the country, such that, in the next ten years, Kafawa will be recognised as a fully accredited and certified institution with a manufacturing hub that has successfully created a pool of extremely skilled hands. Our aim is to create professionals and thriving entrepreneurs, who in turn create opportunities for other young and underserved people within their various communities. We also hope to be defined as one of the key solution providers to Nigeria’s unemployment problem and its ultimate economic development. As the program’s training activities are centered on the Nigerian leather industry, which has been estimated to have the potential to generate over $1 billion by 2025, the program’s mission is to create the pool of talent that will unearth that potential and make it a reality. 

As the first cohort is now graduating, where are they headed & what can we expect from the next edition of the training program?

We are so pleased to be rounding up the first cohort of the Kafawa pilot program. We have trained hundreds of young people, in-person and online, and it has been an enormous success. Over 97% of our trainees have indicated that their learnings on the program have had a positive impact on them; over 96% of them have improved self-confidence and self-perception as a result of the program; and more than 95% are now confident that they can find and keep a job, while another 90% are confident that they can start their own businesses within one to six months with the skills they have now gained. This pilot cohort of trainees is an inspiring start for us, and as they become alumni, we will leverage their stories to expand the pool of Kafawa trainees, beyond the southwest. 

We’re eagerly anticipating the next edition of the program. Over the last six months, we have pilot-tested a variety of elements of the training models that we would like to deploy – from standard physical facilitator-led training to trainee-led models, to online-physical models, and so much more. In the process, we have learnt an enormous amount about what works effectively and what has the most impact. Without a doubt, this pilot program has been dynamic, in that it has given hundreds of young people an array of new skills – from hard technical leather-crafting techniques to business development knowledge and tools – to make them more well-rounded than they were. This is the foundational goal for the coming cohort – we are aiming to create a new generation of youth who are able to leverage their skills to improve their economic outcomes and ultimately, pay it forward. 

As the founder of a successful three-decade-old business, what advice would you give to your Kafawa graduates seeking to achieve similar goals?

Success is a term that can be defined in more ways than one, and for an entrepreneur, it’s no different. Success means growth, it means breaking barriers, it means paying it forward, and ultimately, it means expanding beyond a single environment. It requires a lot of hard work and passion in equal measure, but most importantly, it requires consistency. You must be prepared to take risks; push the limits of your understanding and capacity, and must actively work at improving your skill sets. You must not be afraid to ask for help, and not be afraid to dream big dreams. You must stay focused, and not compare yourself to others, because there is a path that is yours, and yours alone. You must never stop learning, never settle for less than the best and shun mediocrity so that your product speaks before you do. And finally, you must trust the process, stay authentic, and always remember that good things take time.