Eric Osuorah: Empowering Communities Through Azoneta

Tasha: Good morning. Can you please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your non profit origin story?

Eric: Thanks for meeting with me, Tasha. My name is Eric Osourah I am the director of Azoneta, which is my charity that is incorporated here in Canada, but we do work across Sub Saharan Africa.

Eric: My journey we’ve been running as on Azoneta for over three years. Our purpose is really around quality education good health and wellbeing and alleviating poverty.

Eric: We’ve been so lucky to get involved with a lot of projects across Nigeria and six or seven other sub Saharan countries ranging from Uganda, Cameroon, Sudan. Ghana and others, right? We’ve helped renovate schools, build schools donate thousands of books uniforms and all whatnot that cut across these three purposes that I pointed out that that our charity is involved in.

Eric: And as a letter then inspired. Some of the other work that I do as a social entrepreneur that we can get into all of that much later, but that’s been my journey so far.

Tasha: I love that. And is this a very personal, like you’re part of the founding team, like what was the personal piece behind starting Azoneta

Eric: I started Azoneta, it’s it’s a private foundation significant donations come from me. It’s definitely something that started during COVID. I tend to donate to charitable organizations like World Food Program and United Nations and all whatnot, and then COVID hit and I saw the, we all saw the impact of COVID and

Eric: at

Eric: the time I started asking myself, should I really up, up my donations to these organizations and run things by myself.

Eric: But at the time I was having this conversation with with family and my my, my wife and all whatnot, and at the time, and the decision came up to be, it might be better to just, why don’t you start off something on your own, and focus on doing this personally for people back home.

Eric: . I’m originally from Nigeria and I remember sending money just to support them during the COVID crisis.

Eric: So at the time I decided to make that bold step. I registered as a not for profit and then I started having a conversation with Michelle and she has been an amazing human being from day one and very supportive.

Eric: It all started with just consulting with us because she’s a teacher. So I started consulting with her on little things like education. What should, what do you think these kids might need? What are the curriculums and all whatnot? And she was giving tips and I said. I don’t think I can do this by myself.

Eric: Would you mind joining me? I don’t think she knew what she was getting into. But again, because she’s very selfless, she loves to help these kids back in Africa and she continuously does these amazing things, even outside of Azoneta as well. So she, she agreed to sign up and to support me in this venture.

Eric: And so that, that was my personal motivation because COVID just hit and I decided to do this on my own. Now that we’ve become a charity, Bell has been so supportive because whatever I donate as an employee to my charity, Bell matches that a hundred percent.

Tasha: And what’s your favorite thing so far about being a social impact entrepreneur, starting your own charity.

Eric: I think the favorite part is when you set out to do an initiative and the initiative is completed and then you see the smiles of The beneficiaries, right? I remember I have a very first project where we had to, I sent a relative of mine to my hometown in Southeastern part of Nigeria to go to a school that I knew, I know about when I was still a kid.

Eric: I remember we used to go there every Sunday for mass during the week, it’s a school then every Sunday becomes a church.

Eric: So I inquired about, um, this school and I, my relative got there and she mentioned to me how, First of all, I think I called the principal of the school.

Eric: And at the time I thought she was just going to ask me for pencils and pens. I was like, that’s nothing. I’ll write up a, send her money to go fund that. And she did literally didn’t take me seriously. She was asking me, I don’t think, we want to get involved in what’s our problems here. Other people have tried.

Eric: And when we told them the issues that we had, they backed away. So I was how bad we’d be. So she told me, look, we don’t, these kids don’t have They don’t have desks in their classrooms. So I sent a relative there just to confirm she was telling me the truth. And she came back, sent me pictures. You could see babies sitting on concrete floors, and so I said, okay, go get go talk to a carpenter, find out how much this would cost to build out these desks.

Eric: And then she told me we can’t build desks here. And I’m like, that’s what they want. She said, you cannot build a desk. And I said, why? She said, there is no roof in this school. We put out desks, come rain, shine, destroy. She sent me pictures of all the desks and benches that they had before tossed away because of the rains and everything.

Eric: So we had to get involved in figuring out how much to build out an entire roof for two schools, what it would cost. And when I saw it, when I got the budget, I was like, I cannot do this. So I had to reach out to my Bell employees and family and friends and everybody and we’ve managed to raise the money.

Eric: So we rebuilt, renovated the entire school. And then you can see where the principal, the kids, everything, they sent us a portrait picture. Standing in front of the school wrote us a personal letter that you can’t beat that you just can’t do that. It’s something incredible.

Tasha: I know we mutually know Danica Tynes with Sustainable Access Foundation and so often it, It’s not as simple as, a lack of supplies. There’s sometimes these overarching, bigger systemic issues. Like you noted, okay do we buy desks five times in a row and they all get thrown out each time?

Tasha: Or do we build a roof before we even try to focus in on the desks? And so getting to the heart of some of those causes can really make a difference because, if someone is walking three miles a day for water, that’s probably going to affect your maternal mortality rates and health, because that’s enormous, right?

Eric: Absolutely. I mean, and just little things like that definitely go a long way for these schools.

Eric: There’s so many stories we, I could share with you so many things that we’ve done. You can see. School in Lagos in an area called Makoko in Lagos, there is a city on water. And these kids have no school there. We had to get in there, rebuild the school. There’s so many of these stories that we don’t, people don’t talk about.

Eric: And the problem that we’ve talked about this before, the problem with this, these things are people are also finding it difficult here in Canada. So when you ask for these donations, they don’t usually come. These are the conversations that we were having on LinkedIn today about the sustainability of being a philanthropist.

Eric: It’s not easy. Yeah. It is not easy. It’s not easy. I can only do so much and family members can do so much. Michelle can do so much. You can do so much. So how do you continuously keep going back to the same people, asking them for money? Look at what Amina is doing with cameras for girls.

Eric: It’s how do you continuously do this? It’s very challenging at the end of the day.

Tasha: It’s very challenging. And so this is a perfect segue because my next question is. What are some of the biggest challenges you’re facing as a founder led small shop non profit?

Eric: It’s funding. It’s just, that’s just it.

Eric: That is the big issue. If we had funding, we would be doing a lot of things. 100 percent of every money donated to Azoneta goes towards the work.

Eric: You don’t

Eric: get paid for it. I don’t get paid for it. Michelle doesn’t get paid for it. 100 percent of every donation we receive goes towards doing the work.

Eric: So if we get 1, 000, 1, 000 goes towards doing the work, period. Nobody gets paid.

Tasha: Yeah.

Eric: So that is really where the challenge is. So what is my strategy or what is our strategy here? One of the things that we’ve done is pick our projects. That’s one. And that’s what anybody that’s going into the social impact or not for profit phase state, that’s what you want to do.

Eric: Pick your projects, pick what you feel you can commit to. Don’t go take on elephant projects. Don’t go take on budgets that are excessively too much. So that’s how we do. So we look for, we take a more like a gorilla approach where we go into these countries and we say, we have, Hey, do you have something you want to do for your community?

Eric: And then people just pitch to us. So a few things then we do is we now look at the. Project proposal. Look, we look at what is being proposed, the sustainability of that project in terms of, is this something that will last for decades, or is it something that we’re always going to come back to the next month?

Eric: If it’s not going to be very sustainable, we don’t pick those projects. If it’s excessively expensive, we don’t pick those projects. Like we get a lot of these volunteers from Sub Saharan Africa. Sending us budgets of 6, 000, 7, 000. We won’t get into that. If we’re going to do projects of that scale, it’s going to be one project for the year and that’s it.

Eric: But we then start to pick little projects. Like we might have an entire 6, 000 or 7, 000 in donation for the entire year.

Eric: Yeah,

Eric: but what we then do is we start to spread that out to different initiatives, not just one initiative, right? So that’s how we do. So we just we work with, in Nigeria, we say we cut our coat according to our size.

Eric: So we match our projects to what we can, to what we can do. And we definitely want to be doing a lot of projects that are much more sustainable and impactful. I’ll give you an example. There was a young lady piece. Amolo, I think that’s her last name. She did a project for us in Uganda.

Eric: Wonderful lady. So she reached out to us and said, I want to do this project where there’s this community that I live around and they do not have. any way to feed the the kids going to the school and they don’t know how to run the school lacks funding. So we said, what is your proposal? She came up with this brilliant idea.

Eric: And that has been our template moving forward. She said, fund me to buy. equipment for farming, give me money to buy seed for farming. We will then equip the community to go farm and then they will do two things. They will learn how to farm. They will sell their products when it’s harvested. The money they make from there, they use it To feed the children in the school, and then they use money from there to also run the school.

Eric: And that project has been sustainable on its own.

Tasha: What you’re speaking to there as well feels much more like a legacy, right? Like you’re doing a project, but the project has a legacy that comes along with it.

Tasha: It’s not a, it’s, what can be really hard, I think within the sector and a lot of the models from long ago with, world vision and just a meal. What’s really hard is that we all know. Regardless of where you live in the world, like a meal is a fleeting thing and it’s required again and again and again and again.

Tasha: And. So building that underpinning that allows for the meals, I think is where people’s heads are starting to go to. Like, how do we help here so that the meals are just a given after that? We don’t, because. The difference between funding a hundred meals and a thousand meals is an extra zero.

Tasha: And it is a huge number between those two, but people are bad with numbers sometimes. It’s it’s hard for us to do that. I think a lot of us, especially with the overwhelm of the internet, we’re really looking for stories. We’re looking to really connect with what we’ve accomplished and to have that feeling of, I helped do this.

Tasha: And I, this is, we’ll be in the world after I am gone kind of idea. especially in younger generations coming up they’re wanting to have impact. And so something that you’re doing like this is very impactful.

Eric: . Absolutely. And for me that, that idea that peace came up with has stuck with me since then.

Eric: And they stuck with myself and with Michelle, we’ve said any projects that we’re doing. Don’t get me wrong. We’ll have the one offs, like it’s Christmas. We can send some money to an orphanage to buy kids food for Christmas day and buy gifts and all that. Those are one offs. But I think projects that we’re looking at has to be sustainable something for the longest period.

Eric: And exactly what you just mentioned now is one of the reasons that that we started doing things with a former, for example, Because we started asking ourselves, how can we continue to, it’s not sustainable, just sending money. The right thing to do is to empower these people, the youth, the women in these communities to become self reliant.

Eric: So you give them the tool that they need to then actually start making money for themselves. And then at the point at that point in time, you don’t have to keep sending money. That problem is solved because then they’ve become self reliant. They are feeding, they have enough money to send their kids to school.

Eric: They have enough money to take care of their families. And I think that’s really what not for profits should really be about. I think it’s about empowering people because. If you keep sending money, you are not, it’s a bandaid to what you are. It is just a bandaid to the problem. There. You are not solving a problem.

Eric: Yeah. I think at the end of day it’s about finding out what skills these people have or giving them a skill and then let them fend for themselves. That’s the one way I think we can solve. poverty. It’s not, I’m not saying that it’s easy because it still requires money. But I think if if our thinking starts to revolve around, around that way I think that’s how we can take, we can start to solve some of these problems at the end of the day.

Tasha: How does peer support kind of factor into your ongoing success?

Eric: It is very important. And it’s very important for that support network to exist. And I’ll tell you why it’s important. You’ve been running The Hive for a while now, and one of the things that I love about The Hive is the fact that it connects people and you’re doing this from the perspective of you’re connecting people for the betterment of humanity, not because you’re doing it.

Eric: I will tell you, there are people building communities today. But they’re building it in the sense of you come in, you have to pay money to get in there. Now you have done this in a way where you’re not enriching. I remember there was a time I asked you how many people are running this show and you say you’re a one man show.

Eric: That’s another conversation we’ll have some other time you are doing this. But you’re doing this purely because you want to bring people together because there’s strength in numbers. And that is the same vision that I want to have with our former as well. You’ve connected me with Amina.

Eric: You’ve connected me with Dinika, right? With Maryam in Uganda. That’s another story I will share with you about my, what we’ve done, what I’m doing with Maryam. When we bring people together with the same vision you never know where that help can come from. Absolutely. And that is very important when it comes to that sector.

Eric: We did within this sector, because again not all of us, we are not privileged to have funding, but I think if we have social capital where everybody can pitch in one way or the other that can get us a long way. That is why we brought in the blockchain components to our former, because of exactly what you said, the peer network there.

Eric: How can I, a youth in Africa can support an artisan in Africa that doesn’t understand the concept of e commerce. Put up a product on the marketplace because he or she’s technical, but we can bring them in to support this artisan. And then what do I do? I say I incentivize you for doing that

Eric: work.

Eric: We in absolutely. We incentivize them. We for doing that work. They know the incentivization is not gonna make them millionaires. The incentivization is just to say, to motivate them to say, we see what you do and we appreciate what you do, because a lot of these people do it just ’cause they want to help.

Eric: We wanna pull in people who do marketing, the lady. There’s a lady that’s helping who I consult with on a marketing perspective. She has not asked me for one penny. That’s the power of connecting people. I remember when we finished off the formal marketplace craft fair, I had to reach out to her. I said, look, you did so much for, let me give you something.

Eric: She said, no, when you become an Etsy, we can have that discussion at that time. There are just people who just want to help. And that is the power of being Building that peer network. So that goes a long way. And that is the same concept we want to take with our format. If you are a youth in Africa, you have the capabilities of helping an artisan upload a product.

Eric: We want you. Come join us. You can be a, you come into that program that we’re going to run. We will incentivize you. A customer buys a product, we will incentivize the customer. If an artisan is getting four to five star reviews, we will incentivize The artisan, right? If you want to help market or become an affiliate marketer for a former or for an artisan, we will incentivize you.

Eric: So there are so many ways we wanna create this connection at the end of the day because we know we can’t do this alone, right? So we need absolutely community.

Tasha: I couldn’t agree more.

Tasha: That is the thing that I know can be really challenging, right? Is getting that great recommendation, great referral particularly from organizations that are based out of North America. That’s a, there’s a big desire for that. Okay.

Tasha: This has been amazing. I’ve appreciated so much. I was going to say, I’ve already kept you over time. This has been wonderful. And. Hilariously, we didn’t connect through non profit at all. We connected through a brilliant friend who does SEO. And so

Eric: that’s how we connected. Absolutely. I’ll have to tag Lydia

Tasha: in this when it comes out and be like, look what you did.

Tasha: But how can people get in touch with you if they wanted to connect.

Eric: Yeah, so if you want to connect with me, I’m very active, as on LinkedIn, there is no day I’m not, I don’t look at my LinkedIn posts, so you can search me up on LinkedIn, just type in Eric Osuorah, O S U O R A H just as my name is spelled out here connect with me if you have ideas, you have thoughts to what Azoneta is doing, or you want to find a way to collaborate with us to help us by all means, I am looking for all the help that we can get.

Eric: So yes, please let’s definitely connect and I’d love to hear from anyone that definitely wants to find ways to help other people and help humanity.

Tasha: That’s awesome. Thank you so much for doing this with me and I’m cheerleading you on all the time

Eric: thank you. Thank you.