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I am happy to announce our partnership with the Friedrich Ebert Stitfung Foundation on our New Voices Citizen Fellowship piloting in the ancient city of Osogbo this weekend.

Our objective is a simple one. If every local government in Nigeria has a young Nigerian and a voice speaking for its issues, organizing other citizens for demanding good governance and bringing its agenda to the centre stage, the demand side of good governance will increase and the supply side will have no choice but to meet the demand.

Beyond this, we will simultaneously be creating leaders that care about the issues in their communities and organizing other citizens to solve societal and community problems. When these fellows then choose to serve through electoral office, serving the people will be second nature to them.

We start with 10 Fellows in 10 different LGAs and hope to cover 774 LGAs as soon as we can. You will be seeing their faces and hearing about the problems they are organizing to solve in the coming days.

I am super proud of the core RNV team Banke Ilori @thebankeilori, Hassan Olanrewaju, @thehassanian and Bayomi Semudara @bayomistudios without whom this would have remained just ideas and good intentions of changing our country. We have put this together working from three different cities. But we only just started.

There also others who have supported this initiative in more ways than one – Joel Oseiga, Karimah, Adeniran Adetunji, Isa, Cinwon Alli Bob, Emmanuel Irinmonre and tens of volunteer leads.

Many thanks to the FES Foundation who have also committed to supporting a crucial part of the fellowship for the next two years. We hope this will be the beginning of many partnerships.

– Jude Feranmi

#NewVoicesNG