Bashiru Adamu
A social entrepreneur with eight years of experience in building a non-profit from the scratch. His journey into the social entrepreneurship space started through his community development project as a Nigeria Youth Service Corps (NYSC) member in a semi-rural community in Benue State, Nigeria.
As a corps member, he set up the first library in Otukpo Prison, a prison that was built in 1923. Starting with just a single prison in Benue State, today, his team operates in six different prisons in three different states in Nigeria through my organisation called Dream Again Prison and Youth Foundation. They help inmates to constructively utilize their time and energy while in incarceration to add value to them towards preparing them to becoming better people and productive members of the society.
Bashiru holds a Higher National Diploma from Abdul Gusau Polytechnic, Talata Mafara, Zamfara State. He is a member of the Institute of Strategic Management, a member of the Institute of Public Diplomacy and Management and a member of the Institute of Customer Relationships Management. He also holds a diploma in Psychology.
He undertook a seven-month training in social entrepreneurship at the Kanthari International Institute of Social Entrepreneurs, India coupled with training experience of over six years from Catalyst, a social change makers community. He is an alumnus of Leap Africa Social Innovators Program 2014/2015, and of Lagos Business School Non-profit Leadership Management Program. He was part of the first Econet GoGettaz 2018 five-week internship experiential learning internship program in Zimbabwe organized by Dr. Strive Masiyiwa. Among other training and professional development, he is also a certified coach with Open Door Coaching Australia.
His life goal is to help prisoners escape from prison, not physically but mentally through setting up libraries in jail.I also seek to achieve this by the Dream Again Academy program that he styled the ‘3Rs’, meaning Rethink, Reform, Re-enter.
He has always maintained that the richest place on Earth is neither the oil field in Iran nor the goldmine in South Africa, but the prison yard. His reasons are simple: the prison yard holds men and women with potentials that are more valuable than oil and gold. His desire is to have his team members empower the incarcerated by helping them harness their potential, so that they can discover, develop and learn how to deploy these potentials for self and national transformation.
He is famous for his slogan – “When we educate and train a prisoner, we are making the society safer and better for all“