Emerging Leaders: Bridging the Gap in Education, Innovation and Youth Leadership -By Adamu Usman Garko

Much is now known about the ever widening gap between education, innovation and youth leadership. It is obvious that there is a continuing gap among the three premises that is continually been enlarged because very few people worry to look into them and think of coming up with practical therapies that can hugely and summarily effect such effective changes as are needed and bring about total bridging of the gap that characterizes these three interwoven entities: Education, Innovation and Youth Leadership.

The process of facilitating learning, or the acquisition of verifiable knowledge, skills, values, beliefs, and habits is commonly known as “education”. No nation thrives when her social intellectual environment is characterized by dearth of education, much more for it to breed generations of highly productive youth with in-depth new ideas, creative thoughts, new imaginations in form of devices or methods. It is apparent that when youth are well grounded education wise, i.e. when the quality and quantity of education are adequate, their innovative abilities will burst out in such an alarming rate.

However, at a time like this when things have become quite worrisome in our country, we do not only need youth with innovative ideas with verifiable attaining of educated alone, we also as a matter of fact need youth with relevant leadership qualities and orientations to make the other two premises realizable and relevant to our collective yearning for youths that are capable in every vistas of human endeavours, as needed to pull forward the engine of the type of Nigeria we need now and in the future, so that the country is permanently ushered out of the impasses of incapacitation, failure and disappointment which presently characterised the youths of this country. It is obvious that our teeming youths with the red-hot passion for innovations could only direct their innovative bends to negative agencies unless their leadership responsibilities are nurtured and directed in such a way to make them less selfish in thought and action but more responsible, people oriented and nationalistic in outlook and orientation.

The practice of teens exercising authority over themselves or others is vis a vis the young people gaining skills and knowledge necessary to lead civic engagements and educational activities is youth leadership. Although my favorite definition of what youth leadership is, is a simple straight forward single word that places leadership at the highest realm- leadership is simply “influence” (Dr. Wale Okediran).That is, the impeccable ability to positively affect people. This brings about the issue of effective youth leadership as a prerequisite for youth ascendancy and relevance in our collective march for perfection.

Effective youth leadership is dependent on quality education and innovation as earlier pointed out. This could immensely be considered from the quality of education, that is the ability to have youth with qualitative educational achievements that can stand the test of time; such an education that can help invest in the youth the intellectual investment, the greatest of all kinds of investments which is functional to the society. Being functional to the society means that the youth’s contribution and effectiveness toward the betterment and growth of their societies. Regarding Innovation via this lens then, is considered to be those approaches that are instructive in the acquisition of quality leadership skills.

Youths are the emerging leaders who must be knowledgeable to be effective in our society. For example, the use of new technologies such as IT and many other ones are viable indices of innovation. And equally, new approaches to leadership should include the inclusiveness and involvement of youth that have the needed knowledge and can apply the knowledge effectively to impact their leadership experiences to take our country to the Next Level it deserves. The philosophy such as the Not Too Young to Rule Campaign and many other ones which are greatly needed to breed and produce effective youth leaders will thereby become realistic and achievable.

For a better and fruitful tomorrow unfolding; youth needs to be inquisitive to bright and new ideas; being creative in solving problems; and commitment to selfless contributions to people’s needs. Without doubts, if our youths have these objectives and focus, it will obviously be our national pride to tout them to the world as emergent Leaders ready to heal the sorry wounds of our dear nation.